Fear · Word Crafters

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Fear

The Litany Against the Thing I Already Know Is Fear

So today's article was supposed to be the next one in the reviews series — the blurb and cover piece, the Tuesday continuation — and I have had the doc open on the second monitor since about nine this morning and have not been able to make myself look at it. Not glance at it wrong, not open it and close it again, just — open, and untouched, the cursor blinking in the same spot it's been in for hours. It did not help that it was a weird day at the office, trying to be a good little customer service drone.

I'm an IT geek for those who don't know. I fix things other people breack for a living and I am more than well and truly burned out and have been for years doing this.

I spent most of the day telling myself it was ADHD. That's the convenient label, the one I reach for because it's true often enough that it covers for the times it isn't the real answer. I call it a superpower most days, and most days that's even true — the tangents turn into features, the rabbit holes turn into WCP, the 3am idea about continuity tracking turns into a shipped tool three weeks later. That part's real.

But today isn't most days, and calling it ADHD today is a cop-out, because what's actually going on is closer to the other side of the coin nobody talks about as openly — the manic swing cresting and then dropping, and when it drops, it doesn't drop into "tired." It drops into this specific flavor of overwhelm where everything I'm supposed to do today stacks into one undifferentiated wall, and the wall has no door in it that I can find, and I sit there not writing and not resting either, just stuck underneath it.

And I was sitting there today, stuck, trying to name what the stuck actually was instead of just calling it ADHD and letting myself off the hook, and the word that actually fit was fear. Not fear of the topic — I know what I think about reviews and blurbs, I've got opinions. Fear of just... starting. Fear that today, specifically, I don't have whatever it takes to make the words come out right, and if I open that doc and they don't come out right, that's data I'll have to sit with the rest of the day on top of everything else.

Which is when the Dune line came back to me, out of nowhere, the way they do.

"I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain."

I used to read that as cool genre flavor text, Paul Atreides doing his scary training thing, nothing more.

Today it reads like an actual operating manual for exactly what happened on my second monitor this morning, because Herbert nailed something real: fear shuts down the planning part of the brain. The part that would sequence out "okay, step one, open the doc, step two, read the first paragraph you already wrote" — that part goes dark, and something older and dumber takes over instead. For me today it wasn't fight or flight exactly, it was "reorganize a different folder" and "answer emails that didn't need answering" and "write this instead," which, fair, at least this one's honest about what it is.

What gets me about the Litany, and what I think I actually needed today, is it doesn't tell you to fix the fear. It doesn't say think positive, doesn't say just open the doc, doesn't give you a five-step plan. It says let it pass over you and through you. Which if you're the kind of brain that fights everything including its own feelings, including its own to-do list, might be the single hardest instruction available, because fighting the overwhelm is what I do by default and fighting it is exactly what burns the tank dry faster.

So the move, best I can tell, isn't forcing myself onto the keyboard the second the wall shows up. It's sitting there a second first. Then an hour. Then several hours sometimes, letting the stuck be stuck. Noticing "okay, this is the part where today's version of me wants to do anything except the thing" and just — letting that be noticed, without also then beating myself up for being someone who needed to notice it. Let the storm spend its own energy instead of me spending mine fighting it.

And the last line of the Litany is the one that actually got me moving today. Only I will remain. Because I'm not today's missed deadline. I'm not the doc that sat open and untouched since nine a.m. Those are symptoms sitting on top of me today, they're not actually me, and pulling that apart, even just enough to write this instead of the piece I was supposed to write, put a little daylight between "I am overwhelmed" and "I am a person currently experiencing overwhelm who is allowed to write about the overwhelm instead of around it."

That's not nothing. It's also not a fix. The blurb-and-cover article's still sitting there tomorrow, waiting, and I'll probably open it tonight the way you open a door you've been standing in front of too long — not because the fear's gone, just because you finally noticed it was only fear, and fear, once you actually look at it, usually isn't as big as the wall it was hiding behind.

What's the thing you've been calling a quirk or a diagnosis today, when really it's just fear wearing a more comfortable name?

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Fear