It's not FOMO.
I fear giving all and losing all. About sacrificing everything and still losing. About loving deeply and losing that. This is in life, in everything. In love, in relationships with people and things, and how I work and operate.
WhenI was around 6 or 7 I must have learned about loving and losing things. One night my mom left for an AA meeting and I remember I had learned somewhere about people leaving when you think you'll see them again and the possibility of them getting into an accident and dying. It's one of the few memories I have at that age and I remember it was dark out, I was standing in the kitchen, and I began crying inconsolably.
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Walking down the hall this week after sparring, or as we're now referring to it as, The Great Meltdown, I realized I am terrified of envisioning myself winning and still losing.
Josh told me, after I stood up from the ground still voraciously wiping tears from my face, to put my hands up in victory. That I had to imagine myself winning. Coach said the same thing. At this point, we're conditioned, it's a mental fight this week. He told us as we circled up that he had done what he could do but only we could mentally fortify ourselves. That we had to think about what we were going to do to our opponents, instead of what they could do to us. And we had to see ourselves as the victor.
And yeah. Of course.
But the more I've considered it, and this is not a new train of thought, the more I realized the fact that I don't want to lift my hands after a shit round or imagine myself winning is I know this alone will not cause me to win (right, I mean good vibes are all well and good but they're not that good). That aside, the elephant in the room I keep bumping into and ignoring is that at my deepest core in my heart and soul, that which from all decisions and desires are born in a person, I am afraid that I will give my all and my heart and still come up short or lose it.
That's it. I fear that in love, in work, in fighting- in everything I do.
That is not something that can be fixed by Saturday night when I step into the cage.
Tonight I listened to a podcast on Courage from NPR TED Radio Hour. Margaret Heffernan spoke about a woman named Gayla Benefield on the asbestos poisoning of Libby, Montana.
"The choice to say something is risky, and the choice of saying nothing is risky...There is no safe path, but what you do know is if you don't speak up, everything will stay the same."
She was talking about exposing a toxin in a small mining town that was slowly killing people.
I am talking about the risk of taking a plunge or not. It doesn't matter what it is. It is always true that if you don't speak up, or act and change, or make a different decision, everything will stay the same. This is toxic too, and how much more so than the fear of dealing with speaking up or changing?
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And the best one, by Lord Martin Rees in his excerpt on how long we're all going to last on this rock from To Endure: NPR TED Radio Hour:
"We have the power to endure, we also have the power to destroy ourselves."
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