Debrief in the situation room

Alright, an admission. For the past few months, my intestines have felt like they've been redirected. My stomach keeps vibrating at a rate I don't recognize and there's this bubble that sits in the back of my throat as if it's going burst upwards and tumble out of my lips. I sometimes feel like my legs will simply melt away. There are times when I feel so awake, I think I've probably sped past the barrier of humanness and into a place where I don't need to sleep. Which is to say, I am terrified. In some part of my brain, a little piece of me is going, "Gear up, motherfucker, shit's about to get real." And my adrenal gland rolls out the big guns. This is not your run of the mill, niggling, dull anxiety. It's not even the restlessness that grabbed me in my last year of high school that prompted aimless wandering through the cul-de-sacs of southern Connecticut. No, I am fully switched on. Like I am constantly prepared to stand up for my own measly existence.

Trouble is, I don't know what I am so frightened of. After all, there's a whole slew of things that it could be. Heck, it could be all of them! Sometimes I joke that I'm scared of everything. Unfortunately, it's less a joke than I like to think. In truth, I find most everything ridiculously bewildering and endlessly disturbing. And that fear is constantly kicking the fixer/tackler/compartmentalizer bit of my brain in the teeth. Recently, the fear bought a pair of steel-toed boots. Funnily enough, I think I like it. Almost like, when the scared part of me escalated its game so did the brave part of me. Hell, I bought my own pair of kicking boots and some armor for my face. I've learned a lot of new words to defend myself and cooked up some ideas to keep myself occupied. Those are my answers to the guns pointed my way.

So despite an instinct to line my insides with impenetrable metals, I think I should get used to this feeling. Maybe, it's not so bad.