TOW: Adult Fears

"Ostensibly healthy life is interspersed with a great number of trivial and in practice unimportant symptoms [...] neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."  -Sigmund Freud

It's funny how the things that you disliked as a child or teenager become things you hate and fear the older you get.

For example, I used to dislike bugs when I was a child, or messes, when I was younger.  Now that I'm older, I find that even seeing a messy kitchen or a messy room can stress me out, and bugs in general I scream like a little girl whenever I see them. (Although maybe that wasn't that different than when I was a child.)

Back in the day, I might have had a slightly negative reaction, but the older I get, I find my reactions to negative events in my life to be more and more extreme.

And it's not just me who feels this way.  There's the cafe mocha drinking-lady who starts yelling at the streetcar driver if she misses her streetcar, dashing in high heels while carrying a Starbucks pastry of some kind.  There's the old lady who doesn't get on the subway because it's too full of people.  There's the businessman who won't talk to his female colleagues because he's intimidated by them.  And most of these things are things that happened in childhood, or young adulthood, and have become pressure points for us. 

Freud called these neuroses:  they were things that we couldn't process because they caused us pain, and we can only now go on to start to deal with them.  Maybe that old lady had a traumatic experience in a crowd when she was younger.  Maybe the businessman was laughed at by a group of girls during high school.  We all create mechanisms or warning signs to stop up from having unpleasant experiences.

And herein lies the kicker: We want psychological cues that protect us from events, but we want them to be black and white.  There can be no good crowds, no good events of missing the streetcar, no good can come from treating your female colleagues well, etc. We have our frame of reference, and flawed or not, we feel better holding onto it than changing it for the better.  Most of the time, this is a fairly harmless way to live.

The problem is when our neuroses stop helping us achieve a normal, pleasurable life, and start taking away from it. The neurotic person that needs treatment simply has more debilitating symptom-formations that prevent enjoyment and active achievement in life.

As an adult, we all have fears.  We all have things that we wished hadn't happened to us, and we wish we had done.  But the crux of a happy life resides in being able to shape our own bad habits into something useful to us, a weapon against all the bad things that happen to us.  Otherwise, those protective elements in our lives stop protecting us, and simply cut us off from the society we should enjoy.  To live life well is a life with fewer fears rather than more fears, and a good life is one that is free of those fears that stop us from achieving success in our personal and public lives.