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I woke anxious on Tuesday morning last week. Now, there are always things to be anxious about if you search hard enough, but there really wasn’t any good reason to be anxious. I meditated, had breakfast, tea, but still that fluttery feeling in my gut wouldn’t go away. Then I realized I had to get pages done on the new book because this afternoon is the Mayhem Fest with a lot of bands that I totally love. Carri and I are going, just us girls. Heat index is 105 today, so I’m trying to decide what bands are worth going early for before the headliners in the evening. It was while listening to them on iTunes that I realized why I was anxious.

When I was a little girl I’m not sure I remember a single good thing, or event, that my grandmother didn’t make into an anxiety rich experience. She would work herself up into a frenzy about the smallest things. Everything was a crisis, or so it seemed. Anything that I enjoyed that she didn’t, or that would take me away from her, even for a few hours, she hated. She hated that I played Dungeons and Dragons. She went so far to prevent me from doing theater in school as to refuse to have any of my family pick me up after tryouts the first time. She told me that if I couldn’t get a ride home that I couldn’t do it. As a very shy 15-year-old I went to the tryouts not knowing if I would be able to get home, or I would be walking the 15 miles. (It may be closer to 30, but I honestly don’t remember.) But, I found a ride with a friend’s parents, and once my grandmother realized I was serious she helped me find aunts and cousins to drive me back and forth, or I continued to carpool with friends. She never came to a school show, performance, or play that I was in that I remember, and that includes ten years of being in choir. Aunts, or uncles, would drop me off for the shows, and I’d perform and then they’d pick me up. I don’t really remember them staying to watch much. Surely, sometimes they did, but not often. Wait, my grandmother came to the last choir performance of my senior year, because the seniors were giving roses to their parents in the audience. Yes, I guilted her into that one, and to be honest it didn’t mean as much to me as it would have if she’d come willingly.

I grew up conditioned that anything I really enjoyed, was really looking forward to, would be fraught with anxiety. Often tears, and actual fights, ensued because I wanted to go out on the weekends to game, or had to devote more time to Speech Team and plays. When it came time for me to marry the first time, I didn’t know until I walked down the isle if my side of the church would be mostly empty. My grandmother had turned them against my fiance, and they believed her. She had acquiesced to come to the wedding only days before, when she realized I was calling her bluff. The bluff? That if I married him I was dead to her and the rest of the family. My first husband, Gary, and I did the wedding ourselves. I remember throwing up in the shrubs in the front of the church the day of the wedding as we delivered our own flowers to the church. I was that nervous about my family and what they might do at the wedding. To those few relatives that didn’t make my life miserable during this time; thank you.

I’m excited about the concert today, but Jon, my husband, isn’t going with me. I think I’ve transferred some of that long ago anxiety to this situation. I used to be very afraid to travel, and totally phobic of airplanes, but I’ve always traveled better with Jon at my side. I used to joke he was my security blanket. Maybe it’s not about him being there to hold my hand in the normal way. Maybe it’s that if he’s with me, he can’t get angry with me for doing something without him? I think that’s it. I think I’m expecting him to get mad at me for going to the concert without him, even though he doesn’t want to go, and he helped me buy the tickets. He wants me to go to my first Heavy Metal Festival. He’s excited for me. He loves me. But I grew up with someone that said, she loved me, but she never seemed to want me to be happy. She didn’t want me to be miserable, but she wanted me to be happy only within the narrow confines of how she was happy. If it was something she didn’t enjoy, or want to do, or understand, she thought it was worthless. No, more than that, she got pissed at me for wanting to do something, anything, without her.

Playing Dungeons and Dragons, speech team, plays, all filled up parts of me. It made me happy, and excited, and terrified as I forced myself to overcome a terrible case of shyness. But I looked at my Grandmother, so trapped by her fears, and decided at 15 that I wouldn’t be trapped by mine. I’ve spent my life confronting my fears and not letting them stop me, because my childhood was all about her fears. In the last three years I have let go of many of my fears, they aren’t gone, but I’ve just stopped letting them limit me. But as I face my fears and keep going I’m enjoying my life. I’m finding new friends, new hobbies, new adventures, and new experiences. I’m having the best time.

I will shake off the dust of this old anxiety, and step forward without it. I leave it behind like a dress I’ve outgrown, or a cocoon that I no longer need. Now, do I have the courage to wear that new mini-skirt out where people can see me? Ah, issues, you never run out of them, or at least I don’t.