I hate being talked about as part of a generation, or a gender, or an occupation. Is it because I'm scared? I am scared.

I feel like I'm always hearing that fear is good - it means you're pushing yourself! or that fear is bad - it means your gut knows something is wrong! I'm never sure how to integrate any of that advice because as someone with chronic anxiety, fear just is. All the time. Fear ceases to have much to do with the external content of my life and becomes the lens through which all my thoughts have to pass. I wonder if this is true for other people - I don't really believe that my thoughts make me afraid, but instead that the fear comes from my body and when I am in a state of fearfulness I have fearful thoughts about things I could otherwise consider with equanimity. The fear itself doesn't mean anything. It is composed of things - neurotransmitters, blood, air, the various molecules that flip the biological switches, but it's a state, a medium, a milieu, not a symbol. But where there's smoke there's fire, after all, and phenomena with switches mean something when they are tripped. Maybe I am confusing meaning with value. It is not good or bad, except in large quantities, when it is pretty indisputably bad. Have I talked myself back into believing it has both meaning and value?

Maybe my attempts to organize and control my life have been on the wrong scale, bulldozers where they should be tweezers. Maybe life-organization should stay at the biochemical level where it began.





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