fears – Author Elena Carter

Stability

Recently, I was accused of being a “live-in-the-moment” kind of person. I’m saying accused because in that particular conversation it wasn’t said as a compliment. Or at least that’s not how I saw it.

What matters is, it got me thinking.

First of all, I don’t view myself as that kind of person. I would love to be one, though. I would love to anchor myself to here-and-now, to be fully present in the current moment. Instead, I find myself constantly waiting and chasing. Worrying about the future. Regretting or missing different parts of the past. Always looking forward to something. Always impatient for something. “Can’t wait until” slips from my lips way too often.

As I tried to analyze why I’m like that, I realized that partially (mostly?) it’s based on rarely having any stability in my life.

I was a kid when a country I was born in collapsed. I witnessed a whole empire crumble around me. Not from the news on TV. Not from the stories retold by others. No, I was there, inside it. Everything I knew, everything I was used to—it all changed pretty much in an instant.

Most of the nineties in my part of the world (my teenage years and young adulthood) was pretty much spent in survival mode. It taught me a lot. It made me strong and resilient. But it took its toll. The concept of stability had become alien to me.

Or maybe it started much earlier, when I was a little girl and found out that my father wasn’t a part of a scientific expedition in a faraway land as I had believed. And that he was never coming home. Because he didn’t have any interest or intention to. Because he was living happily with his family in the same city as me and didn’t really care if I existed.

Maybe it was then that I started subconsciously waiting for better, happier times.

Because, as we know, hope dies last.

My first big loss was my grandfather who was like a dad to me. Strong, active, and full of life. He fell and broke his leg, and then he was gone within a month. All of a sudden, everything in his body crumbled like so many things tend to do in my life.

Then there were ten years of marriage. I loved him with all my heart. We built a house together and had a son. We even moved to a different country together. Throughout most of those years he was struggling with addiction. And I kept trying to save him. Needless to say, stability doesn’t belong in a scenario like that.

He lost the battle. Taking his life at 35, leaving behind a 10-year-old son, and shattering my whole world once again.

Years of living in immigration as a single mother didn’t contribute to feeling secure. The mythical concept of stability kept slipping away from me.

So no wonder I struggled to find comfort and security and to be able to look into the future without fear.

Maybe this “can’t wait until” is rooted in the never dying glimmer of hope. I wish I could let go of the fear and doubt. To stop worrying about everything and just live happily in the moment. Such conflicted feelings — fearing the future subconsciously yet craving a better tomorrow and always trying to rush the time to see if that bright future is indeed around the corner.

So yes, I have to admit, becoming a “live-in-the-moment” kind of person is not a reality for me now, but most definitely an aspiration.

Embracing Change

I have a love-hate relationship with change.

I think many people do.

It’s so strange. One would think that change is such an inevitable part of life–pretty much the material life itself is made of–that we should be used to it and take it as something absolutely natural. Yet we keep resisting. We keep letting it throw us off track.

Everything in this world is about change. Morning changes to daytime, and then to nighttime. Days of the week change. Months. Seasons.

Our bodies change. Our minds. Our feelings. Our habits. Sometimes, it happens slowly and gradually, and sometimes we feel like we blinked and the world turned upside down.

There are changes we look forward to, and changes we fear. Even though we realize time never stands still, we find ourselves caught off guard looking in the mirror and noticing the first wrinkles, or stray gray hairs.

And then your favorite coffee shop closes down, and a new place opens instead. Another change that causes discomfort. You can live with that, of course, but you keep looking back and thinking how different your life used to be with or without those seemingly insignificant things.

My generation has witnessed probably the most drastic change ever. Personally, I come from a place that was very different from the rest of the world, so it hit me even harder. I was born and raised in a country that doesn’t exist anymore, so I witnessed a whole world collapse before my eyes before I was even a teen.

Things kept changing at lightning speed. Later on, I moved to a different country. Learned a new language. My family fell apart. Fast forward a few years–I built a new family.

I’ve lost people I loved. I’ve made new friends and learned new skills. Fell in love again, and brought a new life into this world.

I should be immune to change by now.

But I’m not.

This year brings a whole lot of change into my life. While my youngest son starts daycare, my eldest graduates from high school, learns to drive, and plans to leave in a few months to study abroad. I’m equally excited and terrified.

Over the years, I’ve learned to adapt and adjust to pretty much anything. If I was to pack up tomorrow and move to another place–house, city, country, continent–I know I’m capable of doing that. I’ll manage.

Will it be easy? Absolutely not.

A few years ago, writing books was a dream of mine. A life-long dream. Something that never changed over all those years in the crazy whirlwind of my life.

Today, I have several books published–in a foreign language–and I keep being hard on myself for not writing and publishing more. I’m always impatient. Always eager to do more, learn more, achieve more.

And at the same time, I’m afraid of change. If I’m fully honest with myself, more often than I’d like to, I want to freeze the time. I want to press pause. Especially when it comes to thinking of the day (just a few months away) when my son gets on a plane and heads towards his new life.

How is it even possible, I wonder? To look forward to change, to growth and development, at the same time wanting to hide in a corner–in a cozy comfort zone–and being anxious about what tomorrow brings?

My little son plays a game and gets frustrated when he can’t get it right. I tell him, “It’s okay. You’re learning. That’s the whole point of it. That’s the fun part. If everything was easy, it would be boring.”

And at the same time, I think–how often do we as adults realize that? Can we even imagine what life would be like if nothing was ever changing? If we were stuck in a moment, like a mosquito trapped forever in a piece of amber?

In the third book of my trilogy, my main character ends up in a world where there’s always sunset. It’s a beautiful, idyllic little place. But after a while, she finds herself depressed, hating sunsets, and keeping the curtains closed because she doesn’t want to look out the window anymore.

Would I want to be in her place, I ask myself? Most certainly not.

As painful and uncomfortable as it is, change is something that fuels this life. Change is, at the end of the day, the only thing that makes sense.

The question is, how do we make peace with it?

Things We Carry

People carry so much.

Our whole life, we carry something. And the older we get, the more our spines bend under the weight.

We carry bags full of shopping. School backpacks. Purses. Piles of textbooks. Suitcases. Boxes with our belongings as we move to a new place.

We carry our kids when they’re tired. We carry their backpacks, their toys, their scooters and skateboards.

We carry our pets to the vet clinic.

We carry guilt. Regrets. Nostalgic memories.

We carry self doubt. Grief. Fear. Anxiety.

We do carry our dreams too, but they are the lightest. They don’t weigh that much—so oftentimes they escape and disappear high in the sky like a balloon.

Our hands are rarely free of weight. Neither are our hearts and minds.

So sometimes we catch ourselves looking up at the birds roaming in the sky and a faint whisper of envy touches our souls. What would it be like, we wonder, to be so light and free? What would it feel like to soar among the clouds with no added weight?

And someday, we’ll find out.

Childhood fears

When I was little,

there were two things

that would keep me up at night

and have me in tears.

First was the infiniteness of space,

and the other was the inevitability of death.

I live in a city, I thought.

The city is within a country.

The country is within a continent,

The continent within a planet.

The planet is in space.

Now, what is space within?

Where does it end?

And what’s beyond the border?

Enough to drive a five-year-old crazy.

I’m forty-five and I still don’t understand.

Death terrified me. Not the process,

not even the fact itself.

Rather, what happens after.

I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Here I am, I thought,

Lying here and thinking these thoughts

and feeling these feelings.

But when I die, what happens then?

Who’s going to think and feel these things?

Where will I go?

I can’t just disappear now, can I?

I can’t just stop being.

That would be wrong. Too cruel.

Impossible and illogical

Just like the infinite space.

Forty years later,

I’m not afraid of death as such.

I definitely don’t look forward to it.

I hope I have plenty of time to enjoy this crazy life.

But when the day comes,

I know I won’t just disappear.

Space still baffles me.