Scared and hopeful

Me, reflecting in bed:

What if I'm no longer tough? Or if I become softer? Or become freer?

My (subconscious) brain (I'm not joking):

Then we would die!

That was really the conversation I had with myself this morning. It both scared me and gave me hope.

Scared me because I know where it comes from, at least part of it. But the knowledge of its origin and that it doesn't make sense anymore is not enough for it not to try to control my actions.

It gave me hope because I got to be SO much kinder to myself from all the pressure I put on myself to keep on going in survival mode.

NO, I'm not in that mode all the time, but I can still feel it creeping in, especially when I feel very tired.

I have recently read ("Scarcity, by Sendhi Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir) that when our brain is too occupied with scarcity (real or imaginary, in my perspective), we have way less room to make good decisions. The brain goes down the automatic path.

Automatic responses come from the part of the brain that was trained when we were very young.

IN the case of my beautiful brain, that means an amazing fear of death. A trauma that came when my body almost died when I was still in my mom's belly.

So, according to my own interpretation, being in a state where there is scarcity (can be time, love, money), I tend to choose from that fear of death. That usually results in me working harder than before, and actually getting even closer to the death of my body.

When I am smart enough to immediately be kind to myself, I say: "Love (that's how I call myself), breath. These are the thoughts that have been there for so long that they imagine they run you. And you think they are there to protect you. Despite ALL the 'good intentions', you don't need them anymore. You are safe."

Then I apply what a close friend taught me, not to shut up those voices in my head, but to make them lighter and change their meaning. I imagine a ferret jumping up and down, saying, "Then we will die! We are going to die!"

I don't even believe in death.

That (imaginary) ferret would be very disappointed if this body were to die from not being tough, and we would still be there, trying to reach an illusion of perfection.

Instead, we would be failing again and again.

So, we would both (me and the ferret) sit on a sidewalk of some place in another reality, laughing, saying," but we didn't die! We didn't die!"