Today was a therapy day, so you know what that means. Fire up the Angst Machine!

My therapist and I were talking about my problem with doctors – you know, the one where I can’t ever seem to communicate with them properly and so I end up feeling like they don’t listen – when I suddenly figured out what the real problem was.

It’s simple : when I am taking to my doctor, I get very nervous and tense, and so I want to get out of the situation as soon as possible. It’s an animal reaction. That’s why whatever concerns I might have had going in just vanish in a puff of smoke when I am talking to the doctor and why I don’t realize that I had a ton more questions for the doctor until I am long gone.

It’s a panic reaction, at its root. And it lies at the root of a lot of my self-destructive behaviour. I get in a stressful situation, I panic, and whatever overarching goals I have disappear as I frantically look for the nearest exit.

It doesn’t necessarily look like panic, not even to me. That is how good I have gotten at smooth-talking through the situation. I fool even myself into thinking everything went normally. I suppose that, in a sense, it did, because it happened just the way it always happens : with me panicking.

It is the soul of the dangerous form of escapism. Like I keep saying, if you don’t endure, you don’t adapt, and if you become addicted to hitting the escape key on even the slightest amount of tension, you never hang around long enough to realize that the situation was not nearly as bad as your hair-trigger escape reflex makes it seem.

In fact, it is your panic, not the nature of the situation itself, that is making you miserable in the first place. You are fleeing from your own shadow and blaming the light that casts it.

Every time you give in to the panic, you feed it. The panic grows fat because it always gets what it wants. It wants the situation to end as fast as possible, and it gets it. Never mind the consequences to your life or the damage done by its insatiable selfish shortsightedness. Never mind that letting it run your life only leads to further weakening of your soul and your spirit and makes it all that much harder to get anything you want. Never mind that the disease eventually results in an inability to stick with or follow through on nearly anything and so you end up in a tiny shadow land where only the simple and the instantly rewarding are a possibility.

The panic doesn’t care about any of that. All it cares about is keeping you from ever having to learn to grow up and stick with things until they are done. As long as you always flee at the slightest sign of complication or scariness, you will never hang around long enough to realize just how temporary and superficial and contingent all your fears were and just how much fun you could have had if you stayed.

The fear would have evaporated the moment you made the firm decision that you were staying no matter what. That would have told the panic that its old trick of ringing your alarm bells very loudly was not going to work. You were not going to be scared off by those pale ghosts of panic any more. And just like that, you smash the fear with a brick of determination.

So not only do you hang around long enough to have fun, you send a message to yourself that you will not be bullied by your fears any more and that, in turn, makes you feel good about yourself, which boosts your confidence… and makes it even easier to smash your fears again the next time.

Of course, it’s not that easy. It’s that simple, but it’s not that easy. You won’t win against the panic every single time. After all, it has been around for a long time and had total control over you for every minute of its reign. That is not the sort of force that you defeat in one big act of will.

In fact, wanting to defeat it in one big act of will is symptomatic of the very lack of sticktoitiveness that you are trying to address. Life is too short to always be looking for the easy way out. That goes double for quitting if there isn’t one.

It’s time to nail that goddamned escape hatch shut and deal with things.

Tall order. I am so used to just letting my panic have its way that I have no idea what to do without it.

Take the doctor’s office… please. If I am not, subconsciously, aware that I will be trying to get out of there as soon as possible, that kind of suggests that I should plan out what I want to talk about and not be satisfied with a superficial and/or unsatisfactory answer, but actually insist on sitting there till I understand.

That idea scares the hell out of me. Not only does it mean I have to be far more assertive than usual, it means I have to stay present in the moment and really focus on reality, and that is not something I usually do unless I have no choice.

Because that’s the real escape, isn’t it? The escape into your own mind, the retreat from the harsh stimulation and frightening complications of reality into the calm safe stale space between your ears. It’s the escape hatch that you can carry with you everywhere, the shell you can always retreat into, like a turtle.

The thing is, though, is that if that shell is your real home and you can barely function outside of it, then it is not an escape any more… it is the trap.

When you learn to escape from THAT trap… then you are truly free.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.