My anxiety level also climbed, as I heard a vehicle approaching behind me on one of the narrow streets of my journey. As the street widened a bit and he crept around me, I had to suppress a bit of a chuckle lest my already short breath be fully wasted. It was a white van painted someone sloppily with a spray can to include a stripe, and two words. "No fear," it said.
2014 has been hard, probably the hardest year of my life. There have been worries about insurance, money, relationships, and discrimination. But as we talked about anxiety, she observed that my issues resembled the abandonment issues of people she'd seen who'd had a parent leave them. All I could suppose was I'd managed at certain points to become alienated from the people I was closest to, and the effects had lingered. Clearly the fears which were hurting me the most were not new at all. Still, as we again talked about self-validation, I had to suppress the question I had about ending up alone. The goal was to not need to answer that question, and more importantly, meeting the goal meant it was less likely to happen.
I confessed the hill she'd shown me was completely visible to me, and I felt like I was at the bottom, looking up. My other big flaw, my impatience, wasn't helping, she told me. This was an attainable goal. I just needed to continue working on a plan to conquer it.
Step 87: until you learn to work with your flaws, they are doomed to be yours forever.
