Nervousness

I don't like being nervous. The slight nausea, the elevated heart rate, the forced yoga breaths I have to take because my lungs figure if my heart and guts are going to cut up and act the fool, they may as well too-- I hate all of it. And the headaches! I did not know that I clenched my jaw when I'm anxious, but man. It's a miracle my teeth haven't shattered under the stress. I despise how visibly tense I am too, everything reduced to quick bursts of movement before returning to a knot of clenched muscles, all the nervous energy channeled to one toe that thumps like a rabbit's foot until I notice and make it be still with thought and a stare. It is impossible to have any kind of poise or easy grace when every inch of you is two seconds away from the "flight" option of "fight or".

Thing is, I don't get all that nervous all that often. I am typically in situations where I'm either in charge or know how I fit into the social order around me and am aware of how to petition the people with authority, so I feel like I'm in charge in some way. That's why I like systems. I can learn them and participate in them and question them and endeavor to change them as needed. Where there is order, there is the potential for concrete and measurable change. It's a product of my time and place that make systems a soothing comfort for me, I think. It takes the pervasive empiricism of the Enlightenment combined with an entrenched trust in the mobility of the American dream to find comforting control instead of stifling helplessness in paperwork and meetings.

Now, I overthink things, that is true, and that's probably a symptom of nervousness, but that's just in my head. I can control that. I may have to run like six scenarios in my brain before I settle on a course of action and I may do that for things as simple as going to the grocery store, but I like to think of that as a factor of preparedness, especially when I'm in new situations, and let's be honest, I've been in new situations a lot in the past two years. Soothing mundanity has been hard to come by. A daily routine is hard to come by. And this is fine, or at least manageable, as long as I create the semblance of routine by walking the familiar decision-making paths in my mind again and again, day after day. And keep my calendar updated.

I never thought of myself as a particularly controlling person, because I can roll with the punches, as long as the punches are specific and small in scale and I can accommodate them into the larger plan. Let me say it this way: there has yet to be a punch that I couldn't eventually roll with. If your larger plan is flexible enough, or squishy, or buoyant, you can absorb a lot of blows. I can even change the larger plan as needed, though that's a bit of upheaval that I don't relish. Still, there's a process for that and we get through it. And I don't mind spontaneity. I have occasionally been spontaneous. It's just not my default position. Which, now that I say that, sounds pretty controlling after all.

And with that realization, the nervousness bubbles up again because now I've found something that I can't be and what if that's something you want me to be? It's not that it's a non-negotiable, it's just that my default state, the place that inertia is always going to draw me back to, is structure and organization and plans. Because if I don't have those, see, then I have to trust you. I have to lean on you. I have to allow myself to be led into a place I have no way of knowing I actually want to go. Trust is just a way of letting your structures be mine without being told just exactly what those structures are or if there are any structures at all. My independence rankles at that, never minding that my independence is a structure that I should have started questioning a long time ago, but I'm starting to think that I built my sense of safety on my independence and so trust is unsafe. A lack of control is unsafe. I do not want to be unsafe. Please don't make me move away from what I know to be safe.

See, I'm vulnerable. I put all of my vulnerabilities right here, in ones and zeroes rendered into letters for your eyes to see, miles away from me. I separate my vulnerabilities from my body and in that way from myself and I leave them around for people to peruse. Cut my chest wide open.

I don't often feel nervous. I don't often feel nervous about what I write. By and large, I can avoid situations that produce anxiety because there aren't all that many of them and they're mostly clustered together in a subset of human interactions that I can put in a box and leave ignored in a corner of the closet, to be taken out and examined well in advance of any situation that might cause them to breathe in deep and become a problem for me. But maybe they shouldn't be. Maybe they shouldn't be kept in the box, I mean. Maybe I should practice not being in control of things. Maybe I should figure out how to be nervous.

Maybe a little nervousness is worth it, all things considered.