#but i had to resist the urge to scream everytime there was a Reference

[libbys-braincell-loss]

sonic 3 spoilers without context

[my-innerenemy-blog]

Inner Enemy

It has been a couple of days without entries....they have been good (sort of) and busy.  Today apprehension came back in the form of the nagging feeling that some water with brain eating amoebas entered my nose and are eating my brain.  The fact that I ve felt some stiffness in the joint of my neck and back makes me even more apprehensive.  So I guess it is fitting to write.

Today I want to write about the title of my blog: my inner enemy.  I guess that it came to me when I had that panic attack in the gas station’s restroom.  When I pulled near Somerset, PA and cried in bitterness, it came to me that I had to accept something that I have not wanted to ever since this anxiety ordeal started: I am not a person...I am persons....persons or personalities inside that form a collective of voices that rob my attention and serenity away.  Most of the time the collective splits in two camps: the “I” camp and the “self” camp.  I took those definitions from Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now because it is true: In the car I felt that I could not live with myself.....my.....self.  The “My” is the “I” and the “self” is the is collective of fearful and alarming voices that get triggered at the smallest stimuli. Call it “water droplet sensation”, “wind with water knocking my face”, “muscle tension in my back”; whatever can trigger the attention of my brain’s orbital section (I have read that is the section that deals with alertness) will immediately push the self into an uproar of alarm, fear, anxiety, panic, and depression that will rob me away any happiness, peace, interest, and motivation that I have.  This is my self....my inner enemy.

I guess that i have always had it.  When I was little I was always anxious of not being liked and always felt out of place (dad not being in the picture would compound to this feelings).  In my adolescence years these feelings of awkwardness would be joined by extremely low self-esteem and a very explosive alcoholic household where I was always either being called names by my stepdad or screamed and chewed out by my mom.  After I finished high school, alcoholism made its presence known in the form of the nagging feeling that only through alcohol i could relate to people and feel assured of myself (TBH I had been doing this since high school).  Thus, my inner enemy, or the self which groups the many voices in my head hampering my normal mental status, has always been there.  When I got into a 12 step program things improved drastically in several ways:  I got clean and sober through steps and traditions that helped me turn my life and will to the care of a higher power as I understood it as well as working on character flaws.  Yet, I guess that I fell asleep in my achievements in between graduating from my undergrad and coming to the U.S. for graduate school.  

While in the U.S. I realize that the way I have carried my life has been conducive to the return of the inner enemy.  Back in the homeland, I had a very strong 12 step support network that were actual friends while here I have not been able to develop that.  Pride has been one of the reasons as at times I have felt left out because of the language and fluency.  Other reasons might be social anxiety (however comfortable I feel with English, it makes me social interactions at the emotional level more difficult because I feel foreign to the setting...newsflash I am! hahahaha), school, time.  In the homeland I felt that life was full of possibilities while here I have had a sobering dose of reality which is good: life is eternal yes, but everything comes in doses and with a time and place.  Regardless of reasons, the conditions were laid for the return of my anxiety. When I heard about my professor that was the perfect moment for anxiety to launch an assault. And it was fitting...thanks to the program and a spiritual relationship with God as I (mis)understand it, I was not the same socially insecure person.  But I still have insecurities like all of us, and anxiety hit me right in the one where everything hinges in my life: My spiritual life.

I believe that during my first years in the program, my inner enemy was put in check by God.  You see there is no other way around for an addict like me.  Whoever you are (if someone ever reads this) I know that God (or G-d as I will now refer to it-I am not Jewish btw) divides people nowadays.  I do not and cannot dive into the issue that is behind that division: G-d’s existence and nature.  But I can explain that as an addict, for over 13 years I did everything to get my life together and nothing worked.  One starry night, afraid that there might be no solution for me I walked through the doors of that meeting and was offered a program that, in its second step, required willingness to believe in a Higher power as I understood it and, in its third step, called me to trust It with my life and will.  At first I resisted.  I was angry with G-d....where was He when I suffered, where was He when my mom beat me, where was He when I was ridiculed.  Later, the force of addiction pushed me into acknowledging that I could not do this on my own and turned to Him for those two steps.  Everything got better after that and (one day at a time) I am clean now with a life beyond anything I could have imagined.  As an addict my story is no different than that of millions that have found recovery through the same program and that leads me to assert that G-d is real....we are people who were beyond medical and psychiatric help who today are sober....G-d is the reason for that and he put my inner enemy in check.

That is why my relationship with G-d was the ripe target for my self when it came back in force last year.  The self chose to use the incident with my professor to raise the insidious question of: Why would a righteous person have to suffer with something like cancer?  Last year, as it became clear that there was very very low possibility that my neuralgia  was that gliobastoma my self was alarming me about, it used the death of a young girl by nagleria fowleri while she was in a church trip in South Carolina.  The self says: Can you really trust your life and will to a G-d that did not protect that girl?  That is why it attacked right there and that led me to increasingly do one of the things that my program suggest that I do not do: take the reins of my life back from G-d. But hey, it has served exactly the opposite purpose.  The self tells me that I cannot trust G-d and that i have to protect myself.  Last year it started with no putting my head below the showerhead, then it evolved to putting it to wash my hair but not breathing, then it evolved to breathing through the mouth and blowing air through my nose to avoid droplets entering and infecting me with nagleria fowleri, then it evolved to avoid any sort of watery liquids near my nose, then it evolved to not being able to look at the dishes while I was washing them out fear that droplets might squirt up to my nose, then it became covering my nose while I peed out of fear that toilet water droplets might find their way to my nose, then it became into generalized fear of public restrooms, nowadays I am afraid of drinking coffee because some liquid might accidentally enter my nose.  Today, while blowing air through my nose during my shower there was a noise in my throat that my self turned into fear that the amoeba had entered my brain and now I am fixated with the alleged neck stiffness that proofs that I will die in seven days (it is easy to get neck stiffness when I am literally pulling muscles everytime I turn my head away from the sink).

The thing is that my inner enemy says I cannot trust G-d in this world of messiness and randomness and that I have to protect myself.  Yet, for all those protections I have described I am living less and less. How many of you actually enjoy and relax in the shower? How many of you drink water freely from the tap or have your coffee with peace of mind? How many of you enjoy walking in the rain and playing in the snow? How many of you wash your face with peace of mind?  How many of you don’t freak out when a water droplet touches your face or nostrils?  I am pretty sure 99% of you.  This is the thing, in the process of indulging the requests for self protection of my inner enemy i have lost my life...

I only wish G-d would find me again so that He could put my inner enemy in check again.  In the meantime I will have to keep battling my urges to self protect myself.  I will have to work to re-learn to trust life and will to His care and let go.  I will have to keep going to meetings and anxiety support groups to learn to be comfortable with my discomfort and to tell the difference between thought and reality.