Daily Writing Prompt: What fears have you overcome and how?

Andrew Wyeth, Perpetual Care, 1961,

When I was in my early 20’s I had developed severe- crippling anxiety attacks.

When I had these attacks, I felt like I was going to have a heart attack and that I was going to die.

The thing is, I wasn’t afraid of having a heart attack ( even though it felt like my heart was going to bust out of my rib cage like the monster in ” Alien ” ) what scared me the most was the death and dying  thoughts  that were pounding their way into my school and making it so that I could not breathe.

And then for some reason, after years of going through this I got it into my head that if I could recognize death and what it did- what it looked like- that I would know that was NOT what was happening to me and I wouldn’t be scared anymore.

So, I read books like Vampires, burial, and death : folklore and reality by Barber, Paul. I read books on embalming, I read books on forensics. I read books on funeral customs and I’m not sure why-cannibals. When I look back at the books I read and the notes I took, the amount of work I put into this was breathtaking.

What I was doing, I learned later,  was something called Immersion Therapy- lucky for me, it worked.

After I made it my business to get to know my Fear- aka The Grim Reaper- not only did I never have attacks that bad again- I had learned enough to land a job in a Funeral Home and that body  ( see what I did there? ) of knowledge I had gained  added spice to my writing- in my stories Death isn’t some abstract thing draped in black- it a real entity that people know – like a next door neighbor or the guy you see walking his dog at the same time every day and that for better or worse you can confront it.

Sometimes I still do have anxiety attacks. But the attacks nibble at the edges of my mind and when it happens the thought that I’m not going to die never enters my head and when it’s over I pat myself on the back.

I deserve it.

amm