When Fear Has Been Running Your Life So Long It Feels Normal

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I have been waiting to be fine since I was 18 years old. Fine has not shown up.

[00:00:05]Now, I've done the math and I don't think fine is coming. I have been afraid of everything since I was a little kid.

[00:00:11]And it's honestly one of the most annoying things about myself. And that's saying a lot because I think I'm pretty annoying.

[00:00:18]I am 55 years old and the fear is just sitting there. I am hardwired for fear, which is a great quality in a smoke detector, but it's less great when you're trying to just go run some errands. I'm afraid of leaving the house. I'm afraid of staying in the house. I'm afraid of going for a walk.

[00:00:34]I'm afraid of the mail in my PO box which has been sitting there for a month because getting there requires doing a whole thing. And some days I just don't have the whole thing in me. And I want to know if anyone else is like this because nobody talks about this. Not really. Not really. People treat anxiety like it's a phase, like it's situational. Like once the stressful thing passes, you'll just be just just fine. You'll be fine. My name is Sheila and I'm not a coach and I'm not a guru.

[00:01:00]I'm just your internet auntie who's been through some and isn't afraid to say so. Because if it helps even one of you feel less alone, then that's the whole point. And part of sharing is admitting the stuff that I'm in the middle of. So, here we are.

[00:01:15]Here's what I didn't understand until embarrassingly recently. I always thought that this was about being afraid to die. And I was kind of wrong. It's about something else entirely. And once I figured out what that actually was, my whole life started making a different kind of sense. This fear has cost me things. Real things. Friendships that never happened because showing up felt like too much. Opportunities that I talked myself out of before I even started. Experiences that I watched other people have while I stayed home where it felt safer. Versions of my life that I'll never know because fear got there first. Going somewhere alone requires a pumpup process that I'd be embarrassed to describe to you in full detail. I'm not talking about anything dramatic. I'm just talking about going to the grocery store, running an errand, getting in the car, and going somewhere by myself that isn't my house. My brain treats this like it's a problem that has to be fully solved before I can leave.

[00:02:09]And one of the variables it keeps inserting is what if something happens to you while you're out there? You'll be alone. What if you have a panic attack, but it's not a panic attack this time and it's a heart attack and you die. So, I procrastinate and then I procrastinate some more and then the day is gone and I didn't do the thing and well, I guess I'll just try again tomorrow. This is an extremely efficient system if your goal is to accomplish nothing and feel really bad about it. I also watch a lot of body cam videos, like a lot a lot more than a mentally stable person should. And I am not totally mentally stable, by the way. To all of you police officers out there, hi. I'm a big fan.

[00:02:50]Thank you. Watching these videos don't help, and I watch them anyway. It's a guilty pleasure, which I fullon realize is a completely unhinged thing to say about people's worst moments. But alas, I digress. My new thing now is nature videos. I told myself it was calming. It is not calming because apparently one spiral wasn't enough. I needed to add bears. I watched a video of a woman that survived a bear attack and then I immediately started thinking about my own potential bear attack. I do not live anywhere near bears. This did not matter. I had to stop watching the news entirely, not because I don't care about what's happening in the world, but because my brain takes every headline and files it under imminent personal threat. And don't even get me started on the pandemic. I still buy more food than two people need because some part of me is convinced that the shelves are going to empty out again and I will not be caught unprepared.

[00:03:44]Loud noises drop me like physically. A car backfires or someone slams a door and my whole body responds like we are absolutely in danger right now. Full threat. Everybody panic. I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing. Every time I open my mouth in a situation that matters, there's a part of my brain that's already reviewing the transcript, looking for the thing that I shouldn't have said. And then after I say it, I'll think about it for days, maybe longer. I once replayed a conversation that I had in 2019 at 3 in the morning. And it went great, by the way. Very productive use of my time. I'm afraid of my husband Doug dying. But it's not even that simple because my brain doesn't do simple. It's Doug driving to work and then he gets into an accident and his phone slides under the seat and nobody can find it and they don't know how to reach me because our last name is like really really common and I don't find out for hours because because there's so many people with my last name and I don't know how to get to the hospital because I'm sure I'll be hysterical and yeah, that's how it runs.

[00:04:45]And then Posie. Good. It's not even Posie just getting sick. It's Posie going outside and getting stung by a wasp and then her little face starts swelling up and she can't breathe and I run outside and twist my ankle and fall down the stairs and then I knock myself out and I don't get her to the vet in time. I have played that scenario out so many times. She's fine. She's fine. She just sits there licking her paw while maintaining eye contact with me.

[00:05:11]Now, you've also probably heard from a lot of your favorite creators about some of the weirdness that's going on YouTube. Well, my YouTube revenue has dropped significantly from around $1,500 a month to less than $300 for the last three. So, I'm back to job searching, which is its own whole video for another day. But when something you built starts shrinking, the future stops looking like something you're moving towards and starts looking like something that you have a limited amount of. It's about 400 variations of all of that running through my head on any given Tuesday.

[00:05:43]fear, fear, fear on a loop underneath everything else I'm trying to do. Now, none of this has happened. Most of it will never happen. My brain has seen the data of my reality and it's chosen to ignore it completely. My brain has decided that if it studies enough scenarios, it will be prepared for whatever comes. Now, this is not how anxiety works. Anxiety does not get satisfied by more information. Anxiety takes more information and says, "Good, more fodder for my brain. Thank you.

[00:06:12]I'll take all of it. Oh, and also, here are 14 new scenarios that you haven't even considered yet. What does your brain spiral about that you know will never happen, but you go there anyway?

[00:06:22]Drop it in the comments. I promise you, you're not the only one. My body's changing now, too, which is just adding fuel to the fear. Something feels off, and the first thought is never, "Oh, it's probably nothing." It's, "What if this is the thing that takes me out?" I can spiral from a weird bruise to a full catastrophic conclusion faster than most people can heavy sigh at me. I know that and I still do it now. I'm working on it and that's the honest version of where I am. I'm not fixed. I'm just working on it. But here's the thing. All of that spiraling isn't actually what I thought it was. Now, I spent a long time thinking that this was about being afraid to die. It turns out it is that, but also something a little bit more.

[00:07:04]The death fear is real. I'm 55 and people my age are starting to go right.

[00:07:09]And when they do, everyone says, "Oh, she was so young.

[00:07:13]I've had hundreds of panic attacks in my life, real ones. And every single time I have one now, I still think, what if this isn't a panic attack? What if this time it's actually a heart attack and I die?" Now, I've had a cough for a few months and I went and got a chest X-ray and I got blood work done because, you know, I know it's cancer. Now, I know that this isn't rational thinking, but I went and got the tests anyway. The tests were fine, by the way. My brain was devastated by that news and immediately started looking for something else. So, yes, the death fear is real, and it's gotten louder as I've gotten older, and my body has started doing things that bodies do at this age. But underneath even that is something worse. The real fear is that something will happen and I will completely lose it. Not have a hard moment. I mean full public unreoverable collapse. I mean the version where something goes wrong and my brain just breaks like a circuit that blows and won't reset. And I'm standing there in the middle of King Supers grocery with no idea what to do next. And everyone's watching and I pass out and someone calls an ambulance and do you know how much an ambulance costs? And then there's a bill coming that I absolutely cannot afford and everyone is staring at me and somehow this ends up on the news and I haven't even gotten the thing that I came in here for. I just can't get back. That's what the grocery store pep talk is actually about. It's not what if something happens out there. It's what if something happens and I spiral so far out that I can't find my way back. What if my brain snaps and I enter that that foggy dream state where nothing makes sense and everyone is talking funny and some poor guy stocking shelves has to come over and ask me if I'm okay and I can't answer because I've left my body entirely. And the most irrational part is that I genuinely believe if I lose control even once, that's it. There's no coming back. Like control is the thing that you get one shot at and if you drop it, it's gone forever. My brain is completely convinced that letting go, even for a second, means I'm done, broken, permanently unreoverable.

[00:09:13]Now, that's not how any of this works. I know that my brain does not care what I know. I'm in therapy, but my brain remains completely unbothered and fully committed to its version of events. Now, I've spent my entire life being the person who holds it together. I learned that early because I had to. In a house where nobody else was doing it, I did it. And somewhere in there, my brain decided that losing control was the most dangerous thing that could happen. More dangerous than whatever was actually happening around me. So, yeah, it's both. I'm afraid of dying and I'm afraid of falling apart when I find out something is actually wrong. Both fears running at the same time, each one feeding each other all the time. And I think that's what's really underneath all of it. If I can stay in control, I keep myself alive. That's what my brain actually believes, not as a thought, as a fact. Lose the control, lose everything. Which means every errand, every loud noise, every weird symptom, every conversation that I replay at three in the morning, all of it is my brain trying to maintain the one thing it believes is keeping me here. That's exhausting. And I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. I think that I'm finally starting to understand why now. Nobody talks about what fear actually does to a life when it runs this long, but I will. Anxiety is very good at making you feel like you're the only one doing this, like everyone else is just out there happily living their lives, and you're the one who needs a 15-minute internal negotiation to go get the mail. Now, I grew up in a home where nothing was predictable and nothing was safe. I've talked about my childhood before, and if you haven't seen that video, I'll link it here. But the short version is that I was raised on fear. I was beaten at home, terrified at church, and bullied at school. It was just always there. That's all I knew.

[00:11:03]Fear that's been running since childhood reshapes the actual shape of your life.

[00:11:07]The trips you didn't take, the relationships with family, the things that you talk yourself out of, the ways you arrange your whole world around minimizing whatever your brain decided was the big old threat this week without ever even stopping to ask where it came from and whether it's still accurate.

[00:11:24]That's the cost, not the fear itself.

[00:11:27]The life that got quietly smaller around it while you were calling it something else. The wiring started early. When you grow up in an environment where danger was unpredictable, where the chaos could start at any moment and you were just along for it, your nervous system takes notes. And then you become an adult and the environment changes. But the nervous system keeps those notes. It doesn't care that things are different now. It's already built this whole infrastructure.

[00:11:50]Now I'm not broken. My wiring is old. My brain plays old movies when it deals with life. Trauma memories don't get filed away like normal ones do. Normal memories become a part of the past tense. Right now, trauma ones stay in the present tense, loaded, active, ready to go off. So, when something in my current life even slightly resembles something from my childhood, my brain doesn't think, "Oh, that's the old thing." It thinks, "This is the thing right now. Full emergency." And my nervous system responds accordingly.

[00:12:20]That's what I mean when I say my brain plays old movies. It's not being dramatic. It literally never finished processing the original footage. So, it keeps running it. So, my brain learned not to trust calm because calm was always temporary. Calm was just what happened right before everything else changed again. And even though that chaos has stopped, my brain doesn't have a setting for that. It doesn't have a setting for stable. It just has ready to go. So, it stays ready for everything all of the time. A loud noise, a weird mole, Doug being five minutes late, the news, a wasp near Posie, 400 things on a Tuesday that probably mean nothing. And my brain files all of them under woo, we should look into this just in case. So yeah, my brain's not broken. It's just running very old software on a life that's completely different now. And that's what I'm working on, the update.

[00:13:12]So yeah, I'm afraid I'm afraid of a lot of things. I'm afraid of pretty much everything. And for a long time, I thought that was just my personality.

[00:13:20]That's just Sheila. Anxious, careful, likes to stay home. Turns out it's not a personality. It's a nervous system that learned the wrong normal and never got corrected. Now, I've worked on this over the years, but I'm really digging in now because I'm tired of fear always running in the background of my life. I just thought that I was a homebody, a planner, a procrastinator. Turns out I was a person who built her whole life around not falling apart. And I want to be clear, it's not that I have this burning desire to like see the world, because I don't. I'm not wishing that I could be backpacking through Europe. I don't at all. But I do want to go on vacation with my husband without it requiring a three-week anxiety spiral beforehand. I just want to like go to a wedding and be at the wedding and not be running exit strategies in my head during the vows. That's what I want. Not adventure, just normal. just the ability to show up somewhere without my brain treating it like a hostage situation.

[00:14:16]So, yeah, I'm still in it. There's no version of this where I figured it all out and now I'm fine. I got to the mailbox this week and got the mail and came home and it counted as a win for me. That's where I am and I'm not going to dress it up. Getting through the day when your brain has opinions is not a small thing. I just want to say that out loud, too. I'm working on being able to just go, right? Get in the car, do the thing, and then come home without the whole production beforehand. That's the goal right now. Small, boring, completely life-changing.

[00:14:51]The fear has already had a lot of my life, and I'm working on making sure it doesn't get all of it. That's the most honest thing that I've got right now.

[00:14:59]And here's what I didn't understand for a long time. The fear didn't show up in a vacuum. It had help. There were sentences I believed, advice that I followed because it sounded reasonable and came from someone who looked like they had it all together. And some of it made everything worse. Not because I was naive, but because I was trying. Because getting it right felt like the one thing standing between me and everything falling apart. There's a specific kind of advice that sounds like wisdom and functions like a trap. And I followed every single one of them with my whole chest. That's what's coming up next.