Liminal

When you start letting go of fear, you make room. For everything.

Much of my life, my emotions have been subsumed under low-grade anxiety. In times of stress, I tend to break out in hypochondria. I imagine I am dying for any number of exotic and mundane reasons. Bad heart, cancer, aneurysm. It’s a response I learned close to home. Easier to be frightened of dying, which will definitely happen at some point, than to face everything frightening about living.

But I have pretty good health insurance these days. Not the best I’ve ever had, but good enough to finally, after many years, go for allergy testing. I assumed I was potentially allergic to everything. Cat dander, pine needles, leaf mold, penicillin, truffle oil, you name it. I particularly assumed I had developed an allergy to shellfish as an adult. One of my siblings is actually quite allergic and has gotten worse over the years, so it was a reasonable thing to avoid.

At some point, though, you get tired of the restrictions. You get tired of the fear and the running and the narrowing of your life. I got tired of wondering what a slipup would cost me. So I found out what allergy testing would cost me instead.

After sixty-one tests and two controls, it was conclusive. I had zero reaction to anything except the one control I was supposed to react to. Nothing. Zip. No local or common molds, grasses, trees, weeds, eggs, mushrooms, pet dander, household pests, none of it. And absolutely no reaction to mollusks or shellfish.

So I’m safe. I might have intolerances or other sensitivities, and I can explore that with the medical team, but nothing I tested for is going to kill me.

When that fear leaves the body, other emotions rush in to take its place. The first ones were relief and joy. I could stop worrying! I could stop being careful! I could try scallops! Maybe I would want to eat scallops. Maybe I would want to try softshell crab again, as I had once when I was young. I see commercials for scampi and instead of automatic revulsion, I feel expansive, magnanimous.

After the initial hit of relief, though, came a wave of sadness and anger. I thought about how much time I have lost to the fear of my body betraying me. I let that fear control my mind and my actions. I used that fear to keep the world outside my door. Obviously I couldn’t travel or try new things because I could get sick, and then what would happen to me?

I can’t use that as an excuse anymore. It’s not allergies keeping me home. It’s fear of making mistakes. It’s fear of spending money and then running into an emergency and not having it. It’s fear of having to depend on others and finding there is no one I can turn to.

But those fears confront me at home, too. If I make room in my life for these possibilities when venturing outside my comfort zone, do I have to acknowledge them within it?

Henri Nouwen wrote that we get a little funny when we try to depend on other human beings to fulfill our emotional needs. We get needy and grasping and a little desperate. We know no one human can be everything to us. Even many humans, with their range of talents and methods of caring, can’t completely fill the void. We have to be enough before we ever step into the world. Nouwen, of course, advised that we focus on God as our source, because only God can love us perfectly and fully.

I see his point, but I struggle with that conclusion. I want to be self-sufficient. I hate the feeling of needing people. I hate how small it makes me and I hate how uncomfortable it seems to make others. But I do need people, and I am not self-sufficient. There is no way to be perfectly contained. We spill over. I spill over. I struggle to believe that anyone wants to catch my mess. I have been told enough times how inconvenient and tiring it is to clean up. It’s hard to believe God wants any part of it. How boring.

Over the weekend, though, I had something like an emotional allergic reaction. It’s been a while since I had a true dissociative episode in response to trauma. But some new information triggered a PTSD response, and I spent the next few hours as far outside of my body as I could get.

In the past, I would have just dealt with it on the couch and not said anything until after it was over. But I’m tired of running. I’m tired of fear. Something shifted in me after the allergy testing session. I couldn’t stop the emotional detachment, but I could mentally run through ways to take care of myself. I called my counselor, and I called a friend, who had me come over and gave me tea and a blanket and talked gently with me about miscellany and let me be still without being alone.

I was not sure reaching out was going to help. In fact, I felt confident reaching out would confirm my fears, much as I had felt confident allergy testing would confirm my suspicions about my body’s fragility. I was just tired of wondering. Better to know and then deal with that.

Driving home afterward, I was able to talk with God, something I’ve had trouble doing for weeks now. I asked for help letting go of my fears. I am going to have to keep asking, because it turns out the biggest part of getting that help is making room for it.

I’ve spent most of my life in liminal spaces, never fully rooting anywhere, never planting my feet. How do you grow that way?