FMF31 2018 Day 2: AFRAID

I am participating in 31 Days of Five Minute Free Writes 2018 (all of my submissions can be found here).

Today’s prompt is: AFRAID

I was grappling with something emotionally this week. Although on its surface, it was a “small” thing, it had grown to epic proportions in my head.

It was without a doubt the kind of thing I could have made definitive progress on given an hour with a good therapist.

I even found a good therapist. She’s someone I know, who in a different capacity was our family’s social worker when my father-in-law was in hospice care. She is practicing on her own now. The beauty of using her? She knows me (relatively well — I mean she was “part of” our family in a raw, dark time). I know her skills well enough (I mean, she elicited emotional(ish) responses from my stoic, ill father-in-law and provided some degree of emotional support to my (also relatively stoic) husband. I could fast forward through much context because she knows.

And yet ….. I wavered.

Instead of spending $100 (a fair price – and she charges sliding scale, which doesn’t help me but I still think is cool), I paid for my indecision and emotional paralysis — for being afraid I had said the wrong thing in a situation that mattered deeply to me — not with $100 in cash but in the heavy emotional price of questioning myself and staying stuck. I knew (though) time would work it out. And as it turns out the situation did resolve.

But why do we keep cashing in our emotional reserves when an hour at the “mental health bank” could possibly make us whole again?

Paula Kiger

Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.