Facing Fear

It’s Monday. Like many Mondays this one comes with fear. Not overwhelming for which I am grateful, but fear none the less. Monday fear is: the weekend is over and I am thrust back into the world. I fear the work week unrolling before me. Can I do it? Will I be found out? All my ideas of myself are tested. Do I do enough? Do I try to do too much?
On Mondays I am also thrust into a different view of this relationship. Friday to Sunday we are together or making plans or talking as “we”. But on Monday he is him and I am me. I wonder if the we is real. Have I succumbed to fantasy? Am I expecting too much? Or not enough? On Mondays I wonder if there will be a Monday in the future when I will wake up alone and start my week. Will I be sad? Or happier?

I decided this morning that I will not think about him today. It’s just too hard on Mondays. At the gym I began to catch each “him” thought and toss it away like a ball. Whoops, I caught one but then Whoosh, I toss it away like a kid playing hot potato.

At the office I am preparing for my class and I read an essay by Erica Jong about writing. A Monday gift buried there. She writes this:

“All the good things that have happened to me in the last several years have come, without exception, from a willingness to change, to risk the unknown, to do the very things I feared the most. Every poem and every page of fiction I have written has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, always uncertainty about its reception. Every life decision I have made—from changing jobs, to changing partners, to changing homes—has been taken with trepidation. I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as part of my life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, you’ll die if you venture too far.”