The Only Thing We Have to Fear

Ben:

A few posts ago I did a Star Wars themed satirical piece dealing with politics and religion. Some people held their breath, hoping they wouldn’t be plunged headlong into another political discussion which might cause them emotional distress. Only after seeing it was just in good fun did they let out a sigh of relief and enjoy the post.

That got me to thinking. Why all the fear? Why all the discomfort when it comes to things political?

I think our political fear is primarily about our collective anxieties relating to all the variables in life which can negatively impact us. Poverty, sickness, harm by accident or by the hands of someone else, loss of a means to support ourselves, people we view as “bad guys” winning while the people we view as “good guys” losing, all are examples of things that are out of our control that will hurt us in some fashion. Our instinct is to look to things bigger than us to prevent bad things from happening, and the government is often that “bigger thing” we look to for protection.

I do believe governments coupled with private citizens can help prevent some of the bad things. We have numerous documents showing the rights we’re entitled to. To help deal with people who violate those rights, we have a police department, a legal system, and places to confine those who break the law. If we suffer injury or illness, we have teams of mobile emergency responders at the ready to whisk us away to places which can restore us to health. We also have various avenues to pursue help when we’re not in positions to support ourselves.

Even so, even the biggest government and biggest collection of well-meaning citizens can’t prevent all the bad things from happening to us. People still get hurt by accidents or by other people; houses burn down; flood waters rise; tornadoes and earthquakes ravage neighborhoods; people get sick, lose jobs, and suffer the loss of quality of life; people die untimely deaths. Life is uncertain and that uncertainty can be terrifying.

Like children hiding under blankets, we avoid the truth of this uncertain world by clinging to the unrealistic hope that there is a force in our life that will stop all the bad things from happening. We place our hope in politicians who promise they can remake the world in such a way that we can rest easy in it. That we can go to bed at night and when we awaken the next day nothing will have changed. Our jobs will be there, our houses will be there, and we’ll be happy and safe. But our guy says the rival politicians won’t help us, won’t take care of us, won’t see to it that we wake up the next morning happy and safe. Then we fear that our guy won’t make it in and grow angry towards people who like and support the other guy.

This translates into anger at the other camp. Whether they are ignorant, naïve, or intentionally trying to hurt you by not voting in your security blanket, they are now your enemy. The other side feels the same way about you and the two sides clash.

I think in order to keep our sanity this election cycle, we need to understand that no matter who is in office, we are still vulnerable to the many things in life that can harm us. We need to make peace with the fact that life is indeed a fragile, transient thing and we should use these precious few moments we are gifted with to love those around us and do the best with the resources we have. Because neither our guy or their guy can determine how you think, how you believe, and ultimately how you act in a given moment. All that is up to you. And 200 years of our country’s history has proven that you can prosper no matter what idiot is in office.

Esther:

Until recently, most of my life choices were fear-motivated. I don’t recommend living like this. You’ll do some really dumb things.

When I was 18 I married a nice man because I was afraid he would be the only man to ever want to marry me. I didn’t go to college because I was afraid. I took easy, low-paying jobs because I was afraid I couldn’t handle more responsibility. I stayed in friendships that suffocated me and relationships that required me to cut off parts of myself and pack them away, because I feared conflict more than I feared giving up the right to be a person. I even stayed in a job my doctor warned was ruining my health because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find a different one.

I share these bad choices with you so you’ll see I empathize if your fear has bullied you into similar bad choices.

More than other election years in recent history, this one has touched a deep nerve in an old fear of mine, and I’ve spoken to several people with abuse histories who mention the same feeling. For those of us with PTSD, sometimes a current, relatively safe situation feels like an old situation that was actually dangerous, that actually harmed us. Some injuries never heal all the way and at times something innocuous will brush them. The resulting pain startles us and the impulse is to flee, or to fight, or to freeze. To make the pain stop.

Of course, pain is only a symptom. The knee-jerk response of getting the pain to stop isn’t a good long-term strategy. The more I tried to ward off pain, the more my fear of pain grew until it was bigger than pain. I started confusing the two feelings, pain and fear.

Finally, years of fear-based choices caught up with me, the pain of those choices eclipsed my fear, and I left an actually dangerous situation my own fear had led me into. Pain, which I’d tried so hard to avoid, saved me.

When pain comes too early and too big in life, I think we can spend the rest of our lives thinking the point is to control our environment so that whatever our Ground Zero was never happens again. But it’s impossible to control everything.

I think the real point is to recognize fear as the enemy. To see pain as a teacher, not a torturer. And to learn how to breathe through the pain when it comes again.

Dogs of War

Esther:

Ben and I don’t consider three teenagers challenging enough, so we also have three dogs with a strong prey drive. As long as you have a fenced-in backyard, dogs with strong prey drives are really no problem.

Except Bernard, our Lab/Boxer, is surprisingly light on his feet. He’ll spring clean over a 3-foot chain link fence just to sniff what’s on the other side.

So we stopped relying solely on the chain link fence and started clipping Bernard to a tie-down when he went outside.

Until he snapped the connector ring on the tie-down and jumped the fence again.

We considered building a privacy fence until we saw Bernard clear the 8-foot privacy fence of a neighbor. So that was out.

It didn’t look like we had any choice but to install an invisible fence. Ben spent the greater part of a day working on that and for the next few weeks we introduced our dogs to it and trained them on its usage.

But then Beasley, our German Shepherd/Basset Hound, learned she could punch past the initial discomfort of the static collar and be free. She taught Bernard how to ignore his own static collar, and he helped her escape with him over the fence. We weren’t sure how she had gotten over the fence as she lacks Bernard’s springiness, but one time she had dislodged a block wedged between fence posts to join Bernard on the other side and together they went on a merry neighborhood rampage. So we didn’t put much past her, either.

Once our canine Bonnie and Clyde had defeated the invisible fence, I began to see Beasley and Bernard as dogs of mythical proportions. Other people had sedate family pets content to stay inside when the front door was activated, while our dogs smashed through the double-stacked pet gates at the very sound of our front door opening. We had managed to find two beasts from some havoc-wreaking pack.

Not to be thwarted, Ben bought a 50-foot tie-down cable rated for 200+ dogs and secured it to the base of a 19-year-old bush. Bernard slipped his collar and jumped the fence.

Ben tried again with a leather and nylon harness.

Bernard jumped the fence with the cable still attached, then left the torn harness in the neighbor’s yard to mock us with its emptiness when we pulled it back over the fence.

At this point it was clear we would have to treat the dogs like prisoners and only allow short, supervised walks in the yard. The very first time one of our daughters was the warden in charge, Bernard promptly sprang the fence and Beasley expertly scrambled up and over to follow.

At wits’ end, Ben replaced the 50-foot cable with a 20-foot one and got Martingale collars for our escapees. Beasley and Bernard are escorted outside one at a time when they need to use the facilities and this is working well to contain them.

But we know they still hear the cry of havoc on the wind, the call to war against squirrels and skunks and outdoor cats, and we remain vigilant.

Ben:

The third dog in our trio of ruffian canines is Jinx. Jinx is a female West Highland White Terrier (Westie). The Westie is a Scottish breed with a white coat and is typically 10-15 pounds in size. Westies are tenacious, energetic, affectionate, playful, and fierce and Jinx possesses all of those traits in abundance. The Westie my parents owned when I was growing up also embodied all those traits.

After I showed Esther videos and articles on Westies, she was sold on the idea -- so much so that she sent me a link to a breeder one morning. By that evening, I’d acquired Jinx and brought her home. The breeder told me that she was a troublemaker and I knew she’d fit right in with our bunch. The entire family immediately fell in love with her.

Almost finished growing, Jinx looks like she’ll top out around the 10-pound range, which is on the smaller end of the spectrum for her breed, but don’t tell Jinx that. She’s a 100-pound dog in a 10-pound body. She loves mixing it up with the other two dogs, and when they wrestle and pounce on each other, Jinx is right in the thick of it. She’s very rough and tumble.

When Jinx isn’t diving into the dog pile to wrestle, she’s burrowing under covers, leaping off the bed, chasing her tail, and attacking empty plastic bottles. I’m also convinced I could contract her out to do demolition on houses being renovated. She chews on furniture, rips up linoleum, gnaws on baseboards, and could probably singlehandedly destroy an entire home if given enough unsupervised time.

Jinx does have one enemy though: dog bowls. They offend her.

Early on, they offended her by having the nerve to be empty. After she finished eating and/or drinking, she’d growl, then flip and chase the bowl around the kitchen. Once the evil bowl is cornered and she can’t push it anymore, she’ll lie on her stomach and bark at it incessantly. Lately though, the dog bowls don’t even have to be empty to piss her off. They just have to exist. If left alone long enough with dog dishes, she’ll grab one side in her mouth, flip it over (emptying the contents all over the floor), and run around with it, barking as she goes. In addition to contracting her out for demolition, I think she could moonlight as a K-9 unit. She attacks things as if they’d insulted her mother.

Jinx is also a superb breakfast companion. She’s better than coffee (or at least as good as). Our morning routine consists of taking Jinx out of her crate and taking turns holding her in the morning. While Jinx is still waking up and her frenetic Westie synapses haven’t begun to fire yet, she’s quite the cuddle bug. We’re treated to sleepy eyes, yawns, and nuzzles. In return she gets to clean our breakfast plates at the table. (Maybe we shouldn’t, but YOU try and say no to those big brown eyes!)

We have a motley crew of dogs. Things go awry on a regular basis and, more often than not, I find myself storming through the neighborhood in pajama pants and fuzzy slippers to resolve the latest issue. They’ve caused us sleepless nights, damaged property, and terrorized the neighborhood (apologies once more to our neighbors), but it’s how we like it. Because when the human world has terrorized you, there’s nothing like curling up with a pile of dogs who love on you regardless if you missed a payment, failed to fill out a form properly, or didn’t return a call.

Weeds Against Humanity

Ben:

Our property spans a quarter acre at most, and, like most properties, the outside requires upkeep: the lawn mowed and edged, the weeds pulled, the gutters and downspouts cleaned out, and, if so desired, some flowers planted. Normally, this upkeep doesn’t require too much time or effort to accomplish. However, a couple years ago I went back to school to finish getting my degree. This meant that things like sleeping, eating properly, watching television, playing games, and especially lawn maintenance went to the wayside.

Two years have passed since I last took proper care of the outside of our home. Last week, finding some free time to try to catch things up, I found that work that used to take an afternoon to complete now took the better part of a week to accomplish. Half of our yard had been overgrown. The weeds and saplings normally pulled with little effort had now grown into small trees and stubborn patches of brush that had to be attacked with hoe and shovel. Some areas will even require professional help to clear out because I lack the tools and experience to do so.

As I surveyed our backyard, which I’ve mostly reclaimed now, the thought occurred to me that there are people very much like the weeds I struggled to remove. Controlling people, especially. Like weeds worming into an unsuspecting lawn, a controlling person will begin worming their way into a person’s life by offering small “favors” or giving modest “gifts” to their victims. Offered freely on the surface, these offerings are quickly followed with requests for the victim to reciprocate. The controller’s requests are harmless and easy to comply with at first but, as time goes on, the favors and gifts outstrip the receiver’s ability to respond in kind. For example, the controller will “loan” a large sum of money when the victim is in a bind that they have no way of paying back immediately. At that point, the controller has achieved their first goal.

The controller has now established an artificial sense of obligation in their victim. The controller then adds “suggestions” to the mix, weighing in on every area of their victim’s life -- what they should eat, what they should wear, and so on. The victim begins to feel the controller’s tightening grasp and experiences the conflict of their own free will clashing with the desires of the person holding the un-repayable debt over their head.

The more time passes, the more insurmountable the problem becomes for the victim. Like the runaway weeds and saplings that have overgrown a home, the controller has dominion over just about every part of the victim’s life, and the only way to get out from underneath it is to call in legal and psychological experts to help disentangle the whole mess.

I’ve used the word “victim” here, but in this scenario the victim is also to blame. Like the gardener who ignores the garden and lets it get taken over by all manner of undesirable flora and fauna, the victim didn’t take care of themselves properly either. Instead of saying “no” early when the stakes were low and it was easy to say, the victim went with the flow, avoiding conflict and pleasing the controller at every turn. They didn’t want to offend anyone or hurt anyone else’s feelings, but forgot that they themselves were people with rights, hopes, dreams, and physical and psychological needs. They forget they could say “no” and that they weren’t responsible for keeping other people happy.

There is a group of people who, sadly, have no say in the matter. They are the minors: the children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews of adults who play the “you owe me” card throughout their lives. They have no choice but to comply. The best we adults can do is to help where we can by encouraging, counseling, and reminding the indentured child-servants of controlling parents that they are, indeed, people and are allowed to say “no,” especially when someone wants something from them they have no right to ask for.

I was recently liberated from a pair of controllers who haunted my life for nearly two decades. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I’m all too happy to say “no” now.

Esther:

I’m not a hobbyist gardener mainly because I don’t like weeding. I try to avoid any task that seems to need more maintenance than its goal (like doing dishes -- if I had my way, we’d only eat off paper plates). So when I was young, I avoided anything that seemed to be too much work. Saying no to pushy people -- either over and over, or once and dealing with the nuclear fallout, whichever their personalities seemed geared toward -- seemed far more work than just giving them what they wanted.

Sure, I’ll wear this. Okay, I’ll apologize for that. Fine, I’ll agree to whatever you want to say is wrong with me.

But some people push just to be pushing. They push because they’ve gotten addicted to spreading past the boundaries of others. And once their species has invaded non-native territories, they seem almost impossible to root out.

We -- those of us who are more likely to be invaded than to try invading -- don’t want to believe this could be anyone’s motivation. They must push because they believe they’re right. Maybe they push because they were once hurt like they’re now hurting us, and if we could get them to see the truth, they’d stop pushing.

I spent so much time and effort on the motivations of these weeds before I realized their motivation for pushing doesn’t matter. Regardless of their reasons for invading me, my response to them should be the same: a gentle, firm push right back at them.

Over and over. As many times as I need to. Pulling out their weeds every single time I see them, as soon as I see them, because they simply don’t belong here.

It seems like a lot of work. But whenever I think it might be too much work, I just remember that not doing that work is saying no to my own right to be a person. And when I keep my person free of weeds, I have room in my life for all the other people who are just people, free and easy to interact with, who aren’t trying to invade me at all.

The Real Threat (Trigger Warning: Religion AND Politics)

• A Note From Ben:
• 
  
• I’ve held off on both politics and religion, but now I simply cannot stay away from either. Too much has happened for me to sit idly by and not make my feelings known. Some of this may seem a little out there for some of you and you can write off some of it as conspiracy theories if you want, but I think I’m onto something here.
• 
  
• First off, I think we’ve all had it with religion being crammed down our throats.
• 
  
• “May the Force be with you.” Geez. Any time anyone does anything, these light-side guys have just got to say it. They can’t help themselves!
• 
  
• I’m running to the exchange to pick up blue space milk: “May the Force be with you…”
• 
  
• I’m emptying a moisture vaporator: “May the Force…”
• 
  
• I’m bullseying womprats: “May the…”
• 
  
• Haven’t you religious nuts got anything better to do than wish the Force upon me? And isn’t the Force in every living thing anyway? You people always tell us the Force flows through us, penetrates us, and binds the freaking galaxy together, so if all that’s true, then the Force is always with us and your little “space blessing” is redundant!
• 
  
• And now, all of a sudden, we’ve got to turn the whole galaxy upside down so we can find “Master” Luke Skywalker. Phht, some “Master.” He let his entire order get slain by his nephew, Ben Solo (a product of a space pirate and a princess with daddy issues), then bugged out while the entire galaxy went to bantha poo-doo.
• 
  
• Things were so much simpler when the Empire was in charge. I mean it! Take a look at the statistics from back then. Crime was at an all-time low, space travel was mostly free of scum and villainy, and, if you didn’t mind the occasional exploding planet, there was plenty of work to be had. In fact, the only ones you had to worry about were malcontent rebels and religious Jedi zealots. Sure, you had to have your identification, there were the work-a-day visits to the detention centers, and there was the occasional disintegration, but, all in all, you knew what to expect on a given day.
• 
  
• All that changed when the second Death Star (I prefer to call it a moon-sized security station) exploded over Endor.
• 
  
• The story goes that the rebellion mounted a desperate assault against all odds and managed to not only overcome the sizable Imperial fleet in orbit, but also destroyed the shield generator on the surface (with the help of the indigenous tribe of mini wookies, of all things), dropping the shields and allowing the rebels to do their thing.
• 
  
• I have it on good authority that a maintenance technician left a tool tray in the laser aspect bay and the thing shot itself all to hell during a weapons test when the beam was misdirected. But to hear the rebels tell it, there was some epic “Battle of Endor” that turned the tide for the rebellion and none other than Luke Skywalker was at the heart of it. The rebels claim that both the Emperor and his apprentice, Lord Vader, were actually on the thing when it blew. They also claim that Luke managed to get aboard said space station, talk his father into killing his long-time ally and mentor Emperor Palpatine, and ultimately escape just in the nick of time.
• 
  
• Of course, the rebels love to say, “Oh, but Luke helped his father turn to the light side!” Yeah, sure, keep telling yourself that if it helps you get to sleep at night. Luke went to the Endor Death Star to wipe out the only other people trained in the Jedi arts in the entire galaxy. He didn't give a nerf-herder’s butt about getting dear old dad to the light; Luke just wanted all that power to himself. And what did Mr. I’m-the-Only-Jedi-in-the-Galaxy do after he got all that power? He tucked tail and hid while the bargain basement Galactic Empire (A.K.A. The First Order) showed up and blew up more stuff.
• 
  
• Let’s say we buy the rebels’ propaganda about Luke and the events leading up to the destruction of the second moon-sized security station -- er, Death Star. We’ve got to then swallow the tall tale that the one, the only, the cult-leader extraordinaire Darth Vader is, in fact, Luke’s dad. All that means is that Luke comes from a dubious family line. So, according to the rebels, Vader’s son is who the galaxy is pinning its hopes on to fix things, right? Then let’s take a closer look at Luke’s dad.
• 
  
• Anakin Skywalker was a special kind of crazy ever since he was a kid. As a child, he schemed gamblers at the podrace tracks; as a teenager he stalked the Queen of Naboo and committed acts of atrocity against the indigenous peoples of Tatooine (They are referred to as “Sand People” but I find that term offensive); finally, as an adult, he killed preschoolers and diplomats, domestically abused his pregnant wife, and finally attempted to kill his own mentor. Later in life, he took up hobbies like killing his adoptive parents, destroying an inhabited planet just to see what would happen, torturing his daughter, finishing off his mentor, torturing a smuggler just because he could, and dismembering the hand of his son. In retrospect, if Luke’s apple falls anywhere in the same planetary system of his family tree, we’re all in the trash compactor.
• 
  
• Speaking of parentage, let’s look at Ben Solo’s. His father was a scoundrel who shot bounty hunters in bar fights, hung out with wookies, and swindled other scoundrels out of everything from their starships down to the shirts on their backs. But that was nothing compared to his mother. The "princess” couldn’t decide who she was attracted to more: her whiny brother or a galactic criminal on the run. Really? You had a galaxy of sentient beings to choose from and that's who your final choices were?
• 
  
• Of course, who could blame her? Leia’s father never acknowledged her and when she did visit him, he did nothing but torture her the whole time she was there. Vader was your stereotypical abusive father so it’s no wonder she was all screwed up in the men department. All this rolled downhill to poor Kylo Ren, the Jedi-Formerly-Known-As-Ben-Solo. Throw in who his uncle is and it’s clear why he’s such a hot mess.
• 
  
• You know, if the rebels -- oh, excuse me, THE RESISTANCE -- had just left well enough alone and let the First Order do their thing, we’d have peaceful space routes again. But they can’t, can they? They’ve got to go gallivanting around the galaxy in their latest X-Wings, talking about finding Luke Skywalker and blowing up perfectly good planet-sized security stations. If they hadn’t gone off and been all like, “We’re gonna stop you dark-side guys,” the Hosnian System wouldn’t have been blown up! Talk about closed-minded. Wow.
• 
  
• But what do I know? I’m just some slug on the outer rim drinking my blue space milk.

Step-love

[This one's just from me (Esther), and without our usual hijinks. But don't worry, we won't make a habit of such serious posts!]


Esther:

When I was dating I was nervous about the possibility of being someone’s stepmom. What if the kid didn’t like me? What if I didn’t like them?

I steeled myself against several scenarios, never imagining that when I did meet my stepdaughter I would meet a daughter I was always meant to have. A personality growing before me that my own complemented startlingly well. Someone I would proudly be best friends with if we met when she was an adult.

It’s a sensitive thing, being a stepmother when the mother has died. On the one hand you don’t have to share your stepchild with her “real” mom. On the other hand you do, all the time, forever. And I’m learning that’s okay.

She never calls me “Mom” and I understand and respect that, even though my heart sings “daughter” every time we’re together. I wear my name when I’m with her and smile when outsiders say her mother would be proud of her. Because, even though I didn’t meet her mother, I think they must be right because of how proud of her I am. As proud of her as I am of the children I birthed. Love doesn’t know the difference between them.

It’s a pang, having no memories of her birth and only a handful of years to make memories with her as pseudo-mother before she’s grown and gone. I try to cram years of advice and motherly tips into our drives around town, try to tell her I love her and love her and love her to make up for all the years I hadn’t loved her yet.

And it’s okay, sharing her love with her first mother, because she has enough love for us both. The other night I handed her something and she said, “Gracias, mi madre.” My heart clenched. Even if in English I am always Esther to her, that one time she called me Mom in Spanish ...

... will fill my tank for the rest of our relationship.

Anatomy of an Anxiety Attack

Ben:

Mean people suck.

Yup.

They suck…

BAD.

We’ve had a less-than-stellar week. A neighbor who shall remain nameless tore yours truly a new one. It was decidedly unpleasant. Considering I already struggle from anxiety, being roused from bed on a Sunday morning to be shouted at by a scary person on my front lawn was enough to set me into an anxious tailspin – one which I’m just now coming out of. The good news is I AM coming out of it. With this fresh in my mind, allow me to share my thoughts on pulling out of emotional nosedives.

**Before I start in on this, please remember that some anxiety issues, perhaps even many, require the aid of a professional to work through. Never tell someone you know who has anxiety to “get over it.” (That would be like telling someone with diabetes or MS to will themselves healed, that their infirmity can be overcome by simply thinking about it hard enough. It’s absurd, it’s unproductive, so don’t do it.) Also, please keep in mind I am NOT a medical, psychological, sociological, or even dental professional. I’m some guy at a keyboard typing whatever pops up in his head, so take it for what it is – more internet clutter. With the disclaimer out of the way, off we go!

For me, anxiety can be tripped when something unexpected happens. The event can be short-lived and may not even cause any physical harm, but its surprising nature is jarring to the emotions. I freeze. I want to run (I favor flight over fight) but I can’t if I’m already home. I’m being yelled at, at my home. A sickening wave of terror grips me. It's overwhelming.

If I can’t run, I try to appease, to please, to capitulate. I’ll say anything to get the person to stop attacking me with their words. I’m sensitive, and loud, angry words pierce me like daggers. It’s worse if the person yelling at me has reason to do so. In this case, I was responsible in part for a dog getting loose and causing an incident (no harm was done, but that wasn’t the point). Since I was in the wrong, the words that condemned me rang truer than all the words of affirmation I’d ever heard.

I couldn’t run, I couldn’t soothe the anger by agreeing, so with all my self-preservation tools used up, I fell apart. I was a kid again hearing my father’s disapproving words ringing in my ears. Defeated, I slunk back through my front door, a total mess.

The rest of the day was spent resting. I suppose that's the first bit of advice I can give you (well, the first is, get some help so you can better weather situations like that): Get some rest. When you’re experiencing emotional sunburn, seek out healthy things that will comfort you, whether it’s a show on Netflix, a go-to book you can get lost in, or even a location like a park or a small shop, go to that place and give yourself a chance to cool down. Also, even though it’s hard, please remember to take care of your physical self, too. The one can definitely affect the other.

The following day was still rough, so I took a moment to write a letter. It helped me put the event in perspective. After reflection, I found that my verbal attacker had overreacted. Yes, my dog had indeed managed to get loose, but when I thought about it I remembered that he got loose in spite of safeguards I put in place. It’s not like I didn’t try. So, where the events seemed horribly skewed against me, once I paused and took a moment to think carefully about them, I began to realize I didn’t really deserve all that condemnation the neighbor had piled upon me.

Later that day, I dropped the letter off for my neighbor to read. I didn’t do it so I might get an apology or provide them with some revelation. I did it so they would know my truth, and that I would know they knew it. They blasted me with their truth, so now they could quietly receive mine. (Mine’s better because a handful of written words trumps a thousand shouted ones).

Now, a couple days removed, I write to you about it. It’s cathartic, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my co-author, who was there with me every step of the way, listening, encouraging, and affirming. I guess the last thing I would suggest in this post would be to get an Esther… but you can’t have mine.

Esther:

Luckily for Ben, I’m a professional. Not professional like a doctor, but professional like an athlete. I’ve had panic attacks since early childhood, and, hey, practice is how professionals are made, right?

Here’s how my panic attacks typically start and continue:

• An overwhelmingly bad thing happens to me. • A later situation reminds me of that bad thing and I panic. • A future situation reminds me of the situation where I panicked, and I panic again. This is the “fear of fear” stage.

The sunny side of the “fear of fear” stage is that it happens during harmless situations, so I can direct all my energy toward riding it out. I do that by grounding myself: counting all the red items in the room, or smelling something calming, or thinking of something funny. Simple math, in particular, is a favorite go-to of mine (maybe because it was never my strength, so it takes the most work). While multitasking might be popular in corporate America, it’s not a real thing; so, while you focus your attention on grounding yourself, you don’t have that attention to feed the panic. And after you ride out a panic attack, the next one is easier.

In my anxiety there is no fear of the unknown. Even when facing an unknown situation, my fear is that the known will happen again. This hypervigilance is how I’ve survived this long, but now that my life has calmed down it’s hard to turn it off. If Ben will forgive me for speaking for him, I think this is the same problem he’s now facing.

You wouldn’t think two anxiety-prone people would make a good relationship, but it actually works. When one of us starts spiraling away from reason, the other is there to recognize it and help pull us through. Even when the other one is also caught in their own vortex of fear, at least we’re going through it together and no one’s standing around saying, “Get over it.”

Seriously, who are these people who say “get over it”? Does that phrase work for any situation? If someone told you to get over it and you benefited from that advice, please let me know.

When to Fight and When to Flee

Ben:

When I was in the Air Force I played Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).

For those unfamiliar with D&D, you and a group of friends share an adventure in a fantasy setting much like Lord of the Rings or King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. One person in the group opts to be the dungeon master (DM). The DM’s role is to create the world the rest of the players adventure in by choosing the people, places, monsters, events, and treasure the group will encounter, and then weaves it all into a storyline that unfolds as the game is played. Good DMs are imaginative, resourceful, intelligent, know how motivate the players, and keep things moving along. Our DM, Chuck, was all of the above and then some.

Players choose their character race and class, and make up a bit of back story. A player can be Brodus, a human warrior coming down from the north to make a name for himself, or Dannar, a mysterious Elvish wizard seeking a mythical spellbook lost ages ago. The choices are endless.

Players usually fall into two categories. The first group wants to roll dice, hack monsters to bits, and collect the treasure so they can hack even stronger monsters to bits by rolling even more dice and collecting even better treasure and so on. The second group is all about roleplaying. They speak in bad British accents, refer to their cup of Mountain Dew as ‘ale,’ and do everything short of donning tights and puffy shirts and swinging from the light fixtures to immerse themselves in their roles. Our party of adventurers was made up of people from both camps and they rarely saw eye to eye.

On one particularly contentious evening, Chuck had had enough of our bickering. While our group was travelling, Chuck placed a group of a hundred monsters along our way. Our monster-hackers wanted to charge in and our role-players wanted to give rousing speeches; so we did both, and our party was wiped out. When both groups demanded Chuck tell us what we should have done, he looked at us as he was putting the game away, shrugged, and stated simply, “Run away.”

The reason I shared this lengthy anecdote with you is to encourage you to take a look at all the battles or potential battles you’re facing and think about whether you or not you should fight them.

A few years before I married Esther, I was in a very unhealthy long-term relationship that took quite a toll on me. I was on the receiving end of some really negative behaviors and should have left that particular battlefield long before it ended. However, I never did. I endured all the unhappiness and uncertainty because I thought I was doing the right thing.

I want to emphasize something to you, dear readers. If the other person in your life, whether business partner, friend, family member, or romantic interest, is mistreating you in some way and refuses to do the right thing, then the right thing for you IS retreat. No dishonor, no shame, no failure can be hoisted upon you. You are a PERSON and by virtue of your existence have every right to be safe, dealt with honorably, and treated with fidelity.

Not all difficulties should be run away from, however. If the difficult, uncomfortable situation you’re in is helping you heal, giving you valuable life experience and knowledge, or in some other way helping you grow, by all means, endure!

Consult people you trust and listen to their counsel. People outside your situation can see better than you and will help you decide whether to charge into that field of monsters or take the secret path behind them.

Some things are never worth the price and some things always are.

And now, I don my puffy shirt and am off to swing from tavern chandeliers.

WHERE’S MY ALE?

Esther:

That’s the second time this month we’ve had to replace the ceiling fan.

Yes, some things should be fled.

I stayed for over a year with an abuser (and exposed my kids to him) when he should never have gotten a second date. For almost four years, I allowed a bullying coworker and a toxic workplace to chip away at my mental and physical health.

And some things should be fought for.

The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do with my life was write, but didn’t pursue it until recently because I believed people when they said it wasn’t a real career. Three years ago I was weary of bad relationships but didn’t know how to find and keep a good one.

My boundaries were turned around for most of my life. I was always letting bad things through my door and locking it against the good. Maybe you can relate.

Knowing when to fight and when to flee is not one of those life skills I learned at an early age. Even now it sits on my tongue like a foreign language, but I’m learning it. I no longer subject myself to disrespect from others. I have a peaceful, fulfilling marriage with my favorite person.

Climbing out of my old life was possible. And hard. And worth it. And the more I learned from people who were healthier than me, the more I started to feel it in my gut when something was worth working at and when it wasn’t.

And, for my catchy one-liner ending, I’m borrowing Ben’s statement because I can’t sum it up any better than that.

Some things are never worth the price and some things always are.

We Had a Proper Honeymoon and It Almost Killed Us (or, How Not to Get Kidnapped in Alabama)

Ben:

We’re back!

(If you consider returning to a blog with only 11 entries in it after a 2-year hiatus something announcement worthy.)

When we began our brief yet ambitious project to blog together as a couple we hadn’t anticipated that college, kids, job changes, career startups, talent honing, missing West Highland White Terriers, and near-death experiences would be so annoyingly time consuming. Now that the whitewater rapids of our shared life experiences have finally spewed us into less white, less watery, and less rapid-y channels, we've turned our attention back to this tiny plant in the corner of the internet to water it with some more of our words.

Our first blog post touched on our honeymoon, which was fitting because it coincided with our getting married. Given our lean financial state at the time, we thought it best to kick the kids out of the house and enjoy what could only be described as a week-long sleepover with one’s best friend. (Our first blog goes into it a little more.) After a couple years of un-fun and hard work, we found we had a surplus of time, money, and stress, and we leaped at the chance to do a proper honeymoon.

In the late spring/early summer of 2016, Esther and I vacationed in the unassuming coastal town of Panama City Beach, Florida. It's steeped in charm and wonderful people, and we had an amazing time. Sadly, we had to drive through Alabama to get there and no one should have endure that, but it was a small price to pay considering. (Apologies to Alabamans, but seriously, you people need to grow proper trees, build a few new houses and for the love of all that is holy, dump all that rusted crap on your front lawns! I mean it! The entire state is badly overdue for a scrap metal drive.)

We had a proper honeymoon complete with intimate restaurants, beautiful vistas, and an ocean which has the magical ability to pull your worries out to sea. However, if you’re not careful, it will pull you out to sea too. We learned the hard way that calm sea surfaces don’t necessarily equate to calm sea depths. One minute we were bobbing merrily along on our body boards, and the next we were bobbing terrifyingly far from shore with no idea how we’d gotten there. Well, calls to the fire department, the police department, and the coast guard and an hour or so later, we were finally plucked from the ocean by, of all things, a Sea-Doo rental owner/operator from two miles up the coast.

Buffeted by our harrowing near death experiences, we returned home to be brought back down to earth by unimpressed kids and dogs who were infinitely more concerned about what was for dinner than how we survived driving through Alabama and back.

And now, I’ll hand it off to my lovely and talented wife, Esther.

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Esther:

Ben isn’t kidding when he says our honeymoon almost killed us. If you’re trying to think of ways to grow closer as a couple, I recommend sharing the risk of death. It works for army buddies all the time, think what it can do for you!

When it was just the two of us trapped in a life-threatening situation for what felt like hours, only what was important stayed afloat. Everything else sank quickly away. All that mattered was that Ben stay alive, and (to an oddly secondary degree) that I stay alive, too. But that we be together, no matter what happened. And together we finally made it through those back roads of Alabama and the fear of death by backwoods serial killer.

We can joke about it now but it really was the most afraid and helpless I’ve ever been. We hadn’t been married two full years, and now the man of my dreams had been swept out so far from me I couldn’t see him. At one point I thought he’d drowned. Not able to swim myself, I was kept on the water’s surface by a thin slab of foam.

When a wave knocked me off of it and I went under, I realized a number of things: (1) it would be too comically tragic for our marriage to end this way, dying on our honeymoon, (2) drowning wouldn’t be as terrible a death as I’d always imagined, and (3) … oh. The body board was strapped to my wrist. Pulling myself back onto the board was easily managed.

From the outside, it would probably seem silly that we went body surfing in the Gulf of Mexico on a red flag day, especially since one of us can’t swim, but it’s in keeping with the way Ben and I tumble through life. We’re equal parts preparation and madcappery, and it’s as comfortable as an oversized sweater, as thrilling as a sale on cheese.

But seriously, do not listen to your GPS if it tries to route you through the back roads of Alabama. You stay on the widest roads you can find and you keep driving until you hit the state line.