[Vent] Fear of…?

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I feel like I’ve made several blog/bulletin posts in a row tonight but I just started thinking about something and wanted to write it down before going to sleep.

I have a strange fear; I can’t exactly pinpoint what it is though. “Fear of trusting others” is pretty close but still feels a little off. “Fear of not being in control?” Also doesn’t feel entirely correct.

This recently got brought up again with the concern that in regards to my mental health, I don’t reach out until it’s literally unbearable. A crisis. And I tried to answer, at least to myself, why, precisely, this was the case. Do I not trust my friends? It’s strange, the easiest answer keeps being wrong. And I know it’s wrong because this is an issue that persists across domains.

For a while I thought I had a fear of authority/authority figures. In high school, my dad would beg I go in after school for tutoring from my teachers in classes I was struggling in. I avoided it to an unreasonable level. Even now, he calls and tells me to make connections with my professors by going to office hours. And I don’t. And in those cases, it’s not even because I need help or anything! So it’s not like I’m scared of being perceived as stupid! And yet the aversion continues.

And what I just realized was, one of my biggest existential fears for a little while was being put under anesthesia. I had never had to go under for surgery before, but then I was going to get top surgery, and beforehand started realizing how anesthesia would work. I would be completely unable to function. They’d have to help breathing through a tube. It petrified me, it was the part of the surgery I was the most scared of. I don’t know what it was, the lack of autonomy, the closeness to death, the vulnerability? But it feels like it somehow matches.

What is this? Why do I “just want to be able to do it alone?” Or… be entirely self-reliant? Or fear opening up to or trusting others in such a weird, over-arching way? Like, it’s hard to even express clearly because all the things I can think of are adjacent to, but not directly on target. I think the one thing I can say it’s some kind of toxic self-sufficiency? But why? Why do I have to do that? What am I afraid of? A part of this stuff wouldn’t even stop me from being self-sufficient, like going in and shooting the shit with a professor!

Idk. I’ll try to go to bed now. But I’m bad at remembering things so I wanted to get this down now. Maybe consider it some more later.

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