Thinking how I can be supportive, loving and kind at a time of great distress for all humanity. A memory of when in the 80s I was showing signs of serious medical illness after an acute "viral" infection which required hospitalization for treatment of tremors. But scarier? #FEAR
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As a very sensitive person who'd had plenty of trauma already as well as successes, #FEAR was not very frequent an emotion for me as I, as we can, somehow adapted to life and found focus in college, guitar, music, poetry, friendship and community. But the "virus" did not resolve.
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What was worse, is that it I was showing symptoms and enough blood anomolies to absolutely clinically demonstrate something was going very wrong physically. So months of diagnostics and testing left even fine diagnosticians baffled and I saw they, too had "caught" this #FEAR.
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Prescribed benzos to control the tremors/seizure issues. They also put me on an anti-emetic anti-nausea drug that was also used to treat psychosis. I became sicker, #FEAR spread more, off of that I went. Sent home alone, my Mom in NJ said come. I was still under her insurance.
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What I underwent in the next year was just insane not only for me but for everyone - medical folks, family, friends. Illness and #FEAR especially can be crippling. My Mom and her partner went to Europe for vacation. Her friend Eda, a fellow professor at Kean University, visited.
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Eda was a biologist. She sat with me and talked about #FEAR from a scientific perspective. She explained it was our oldest defense - limbic system, adrenals - flight or fiight response. She also said that #FEAR is the origin of all human emotion, even love. I raged against that!
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I would. I don't think it's the origin of emotions like love and happiness. Maybe that was a theory at the time?
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Replying to @timtfj
Again, context. It only came together for me this week where fear turns to love. There's an interim step which revealed itself to me as that profound forgiveness of everything, everyone, myself, even despots, madmen and haters perhaps need it even more for they lack the capacity.

Apr 10, 2020 · 11:27 PM UTC

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