Irrational Fears

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Note: This was first written in August of 2020.

Probably the hardest thing about the pandemic for my mental health has been being unable to sort rational from irrational fears. Most of my serious fears revolve around health issues. Some of them are my own, some of them are for others. One of my biggest nightmares is learning that someone I love died months ago and that I never heard. 

When I was a kid, I had some really awful periods where I would have paralyzing fear around health stuff that was obviously irrational: I'd be afraid of ebola when it hadn't gotten anywhere near the country, or afraid I would get hypothermia from walking home in the rain. I put a lot of work into addressing these fears. For most of my life, I've been very good at assessing my fears around health, and setting aside the irrational ones. I'm not completely immune to them, but I can put them off to the side and forget about them and be fine.

Where I have always still struggled is when I have a legitimate reason to be afraid. At that point, I can't just set it aside, and it's really hard for me to keep it down to a "reasonable" level of fear. Most of the time, this is pretty easy to resolve, and move on. It may impact for a few weeks, but once the impetus is gone, I'm ok again.

This past year has been awful for all of this. In October, my body decided that it didn't need nerves running to my left arm and started attacking them. For most people, this resolves in six months to a year, with complete or near complete healing. Some people, however, have lingering effects that they never recover from. I spent months in terror that this was going to significantly and permanently impact my life. (To be clear, at this point I have made a very functional, but probably not complete recovery. It's a little hard to tell because I already had some permanent damage in that shoulder and I can't quite remember what normal was before).

Then, not long after I came out of that, the pandemic started. How do I know what fears are rational and irrational when we understand so little? I'm afraid of getting it myself, although that's the least of them. I'm afraid of it putting my spouse (who has much more serious risk factors) in the hospital, or killing them. And, back to that fear I listed at the beginning, the fear that someone I love will die and I won't know has suddenly become a completely rational fear.

I don't have a neat resolution on this brain bubble post. I don't have a good answer. I don't really know how to cope with my fears when they are far too rational for comfort. 

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