Open source

By nature, I'm a very nervous person.  Since early childhood, my brain has been a veritable cerebral nightmare factory, breeding hundreds of irrational fears, from the mundane (monsters under the bed, terrors that go bump in the night) to the somewhat more esoteric (robbers and rapists at every corner), to the downright peculiar (leaning back too far in reclining chairs, porch beams splintering and collapsing under a misplaced heavy step).

But by nature, I'm also a person who, as an abstract rational position, hates nature and feels a great deal more satisfaction fighting it than succumbing to it.  Case in point: when I was younger, I had terrible lung capacity.  I'd get winded after a brisk walk, which made my first forays into vigorous exercise a nightmare of wheezing, gasping, and pulmonary incineration.  Now, after five years of teeth-gritting, face-numbing, vision-blurring runs, I'm a member of an elite coterie of individuals who can manually inflate a balloon animal.  This kind of dedicated self-antagonism doesn't come easy, and it can often degenerate into full-blown obsessive compulsion.  See: years 19 and 20 of my life (actually, don't, ugh).  But when done right, and healthily, there's no better feeling in the world.

Case in point: motorcycles.  Exactly one year ago, I hopped on the back of my brother-in-law's bike and clung desperately to his broad firefighter shoulders as he executed a cheeky weaving maneuver.  I was petrified -- with absolutely no control over the situation and vivid mental images, in slow-mo crash-test dummy fashion, of my bones hitting concrete at 60 miles per hour and exploding in a fireworks of  splinters and gore, this had all the markings of a deep-seated phobia.  Today, I hopped on a bike -- my own -- and pulled the same weave on a straightaway of dappled sunlit highway.  My fingers were raw and half-numb under a pair of ratty gardening gloves (naturally, in a house with half a dozen motorcycles and thousands of dollars worth of paraphernalia, no gloves are small enough to fit my girlie hands).  But I could've stayed out there for hours, for days, for weeks on end.  In the most cliched of ways, I felt myself fuse to the bike in a way I'd never experienced before, and every fluid movement rippled through my flesh, infusing the soft vital tissue with an injection of indestructible rubber and chrome.

I'd like to be better at applying this philosophy to other, less adrenaline driven, facets of my life.  It isn't just fear that I resent as something that comes naturally to me; there are a myriad of other dark complexes I'd love to flush out.  Unfortunately, outside of the Star Wars universe -- Spike was showing episodes 3-6 last night, and you better believe I was glued to that TV -- they're harder to confront head-on.  I'm going to try, anyway, though.  Worth it.  So worth it.