The worst 10 minutes just occurred. You know that sinking feeling you get in your stomach that makes you feel like you’ve just been drawn and quartered and your innards are splashed all over the pavement. That rush of adrenaline that courses through your body seemingly going from 0-60 in seconds. The sensation of dropping 1000 feet knowing that you’ve lost your safety net, and your world is going to end in a blink of an eye. That state of being, when fear overrides everything you think and believe and takes over, projecting your worst fears in “movie of the Week” fashion in your reactive brain centers. That place where “The green-eyed monster” seduces you to the dark side, and you put your love and faith in a corner and then stomp on it with a spiked heel, so you can replace it with the belief that a lover is going to betray you. You know, that “crazy little thing called jealousy”.
I suppose it was arrogant of me to assume I was “above it all”. You know the “I’m so evolved, I never get jealous” thing that can plague a smart American elitist woman now-a-days. LOL That faux sophistication that says, “I’m not an animal with primal emotions. I’m civilized. I’m self-aware. I’m better than you all.”
That kind of arrogance.
It was humbling to feel jealous again. It was more than humbling, it was humiliating for me. Oh, no one saw it or knew, but I was still humiliated by my own reaction.
Why? you might ask.
Because I hate to be afraid more than anything in the world. It’s probably why I am so brave, and yes, I know that is a conundrum. I’ll try to explain, the contradiction. When I am afraid it is a very intense physical sensation. I get over amped with adrenaline. I mean over amped. Like my head and eyes will explode. It’s a set of chemicals I think, that feels like someone is dragging their fingernails across a black board, only it is in my blood vessels. I hate that feeling. I mean I really hate it. Some people love that sensation, I only want to vomit.
The only thing that makes it go away, is to ‘confront whatever I’m afraid of’. That’s the only thing that makes the chemical reaction in my body change back to normal. It’s like I’m allergic to fear or something, and the antidote is to just face my fear. All of this is on a physical level mind you, I can feel it as a physical sensation, and as soon as I’ve faced my fear, I feel normal again.
Now mind you, some fears run too deep to just ‘face’ and believe me I’ve tried, but jealousy is one of the ones I thought I’d faced a long time ago. I thought I understood it in me, and had solved the mystery of that envy and fear.
I guess shadows of old fears can always rear their ugly heads, and yesterday I was reminded of just how fragile love and trust can really be. How fragile I can be. How afraid I can be. How truly afraid I can be in mere seconds.
It was only 10 minutes. But it was 10 minutes of doubt and fear. It was 10 minutes when I lost faith and trust. In those 10 minutes I was lost and falling into the black recesses of the abyss. Oh I hate that feeling. It was so humiliating to know I could lose faith so easily, even if only for 10 minutes.
The worst part of that 10 minutes wasn’t that I couldn’t trust someone, it was that I couldn’t *be* trusted to believe. I lost faith for a whole 10 minutes and I was ashamed.
Humiliated by my own fear of loss.
And I’ll be honest, the only thing that comforts me right now is the fact that I pulled myself out of it in 10 minutes, because it was visceral, and I was on my way to the bottom of the pit. I’m encouraged that I found my faith quickly and could be trusted again. But it was only a small comfort for some reason.
And that leads me to the little realization.. Unjustified or unreasonable jealousy [and there is a distinction here] is a loss of faith, but it is a loss of trust in your own experience and knowingness more than anything. You doubt yourself really, you doubt your own judgment. You end up projecting that doubt onto someone else, and you become someone “they” cannot trust, not the other way around.
So for 10 minutes, I couldn’t be trusted. I was wallowing in my own fear, and I replaced years of experience and trust with 10 minutes of fear and jealousy.
I’d hate myself, except now I’m back to being arrogant because I figured it all out in 10 minutes.
