The Other Shoe

or as I've always called it 'too damn good syndrome'.  You know, that feeling that everything in your life is going so well, that any moment now it's bound to crash down around you?  Sometimes -- okay always -- it's some irrational fear that something awful has happened any time someone you love is late getting home, or just an overall panic that somewhere, something is going wrong in a way that will cascade into your life? 

Other times, it's that completely irrational fear that all the people who've told you they love you, who think they love you, don't really know you, because you've kept the darkest, ugliest parts of who you are some kind of deep, dark secret.  Well, you think you have anyway; usually the people who love us, already know those things about us. We only think we've kept the secret because they love us enough not to talk about our touchy spots.

I've had those irrational fears my entire life.  That kind of indefinable fear that when things are good, it's just the set up for a really good crash, as if the whole universe were plotting against me.  In the book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, the author talks about this mindset, and says it's very common in children of divorce. I'd always thought it was some kind of worth issue I grappled with, an accumulation of all my fears that I'm not really someone people could love, not if they knew who I really am, how I really feel. 

I don't really know that it's fallout from my parents' divorce -- given how late in my childhood that came. More likely, it's fallout from their awful marriage.  Whatever the reason, I've come to see it's something we can absolutely hand down to our own kids.  If our attitude is one of pervasive distrust and fear of rejection, our kids pick up on that.  

I do know it's not a mindset Gary shares. He does expect things to work out most of the time.  He views my fears as superstition at times, I know.  And maybe they are.  I seem to have this contradictory idea that if I do everything right, touch all the stones, that's my only hope of a good outcome, of safety.  And yet, when everything is going right, I'm sometimes terrified that nothing I do will be enough, that it will all crash down in some confirmation that I was never really meant to be happy, that everything I touch is somehow tainted. 

I spent years, decades really, thinking I was unique in feeling like a fraud, in pretending things were fine and that disaster wasn't lurking around every corner.  Maybe I'm not. Maybe there are other people who feel those same fears, or people who used to feel that way and overcame it. 

I've been working diligently the past few years to free myself of this feeling.  One of the first things I learned is that I had made a career of hiding big parts of who I am. In a childhood where I was frequently told I was too sensitive, too soft, that life's "not like you think it is" I'd learned to survive by not sharing the things that made me weird or different. I did my best to escape notice, to laugh off the mistakes that I made without letting on that really I believed I needed to be perfect to be good enough.

I'm not convinced all this is the result of my parents' divorce, or even of their bad marriage.  I think it's more a sign of our culture's insanity around individuality, some kind of collective fear of being rejected, of not being good enough.  And I think it starts very early in life, when we begin to think we can "mold" our children to become what we want them to be, or to fit into the small bit of space we have available for them; when we want them to fill our need to feel loved, or to impress others.  

I'm beginning to move past that, to finally trust that I don't need to be perfect to have a right to relax into who I am.  It's taken me most of 50 years, tho, and it seems there must be an easier path to it.