Fear

When I decided to share my fear of intimacy with the rest of the class, I thought I would get a cold reaction. People share too much information with me sometimes, and I tend to shy away, so I naturally expected the same reaction; maybe I shy away because I feel the sensitive information flies too close to my proverbial flight control tower of intimacy. All that aside, I didn’t expect at all that others would relate.

On the contrary, a couple people in the group have shared in my same fear. In fact, Robert’s fear was the same thing, and his was because of similar past experiences. Though, a lot of the conversation that spawned from my presentation did not go as in depth as I would have expected from the conversations that resulted in other presentations. With that said, I feel that in a way some in the class didn’t really know how to converse about my fears, and after thinking about this for the past few days, I can only determine that they haven’t been where I’ve been and therefore have not been through the same life filters that I’ve been through. I think this is completely understandable. I think the only way I could have made this presentation better would have been to have the class meet in a social environment and actually show them all how hard it is for me to engage in conversation with a random woman. It’s almost laughable. For as good as I am at talking to new clients or even new people in general, I’m a bumbling idiot when it comes to the opposite sex.

During my presentation, I was given an assignment to illustrate how my fear makes me feel. I sat for a couple hours a few nights ago and sketched what came out over and over again. Nothing but garbled mess came out. I’m going to continue to work on this illustration, perhaps using different mediums until I find the right one to get across what I want. I’ve become so fluent in digital tools (i.e. Illustrator, Photoshop) that I feel I may be better suited to use these for at least some of the creative process. Perhaps I’ll even delve into the same approach Beth is taking on her piece and go back and forth between digital and traditional arts.

Obviously, with as personal as my fear is and as hard as it was to share, I had the strongest reaction from my own presentation; that is, until Robert’s. It was actually somewhat refreshing to know that someone else is experiencing something similar to what I’m dealing with. While we don’t have the same past, they are similar in some ways, and it’s interesting to see that someone can have a similar fear as me, though I also empathize and do not at all wish it on anyone else. Because of this discovery, I feel like I’m going back to the drawing board on how to cope with my fear of intimacy. Perhaps I’ve been going about it the wrong way. Instead of worrying about it, I may start to forget it even exists and let the future come to me. I have much more important things to handle at the moment, and if one day I meet someone who wants to share in my life experiences, then I’ll pursue it. But for now, life is good, life is great. I have all that I can ask for, and it can’t really get much better.

I hope everyone else found the peace I did from this assignment.