Final Score:

Me 41, Fear 26

Some observations:

From what I observed by re-reading the year’s entries, I had 37 unique fears that affected me enough to think about them, and, in turn, write about them. I’m not going to individually address each one here again, as that’d be very boring. Just the highlights, folks. There’s an archive of what I’ve written in the past on this site, so you can read about anything I don’t address today over there. Back to the score, though. The number 37 doesn’t match up with the 67 items I scored myself for in total. This means that I catalogued identical fears multiple times (either because I didn’t recognize them as being identical to others as I was writing or because I was affected so much by them that I felt I needed to break my “no duplicate entries on the same fear” rule), so my scoring’s a little off in all likelihood. I’ll keep it as is, just because it’s a matter of historical record now. Of the 37 I identified as unique, there are 16 that I feel confident that I’m in control of, 17 that are works in progress, and 4 that I’m still having a lot of trouble with or haven’t tended to at all yet.

I’ve established and ascertained that I’m usually pretty good in a crisis or short-duration emergency. Once upon a time, someone berated me for not “reacting” when I was in a dangerous situation, but I didn’t “react” because I was busy handling what was happening in front of me. It’s a lot easier to handle crisis, danger and emergency with a cool head than it is when you’re freaking out about it. Assuming that you make it through the situation OK, there’s time to think about what it all meant afterward. There’s an admitted danger in being too cool, because it puts you at risk of not properly respecting the weight of a given situation, but for the most part, you’re just better off staying calm if you can swing it.

Outside of famous or otherwise admirable people, who, because I’m an idiot, I still clam up around sometimes (I think I’m finally mad enough at myself to kick this habit, though; so many missed opportunities that I may never have again), I feel that I’ve made huge strides on the “handling social situations” front.

I’ve done better with getting out of the house, but it does take more preparation than it used to in order to keep it stress-free. When I was a kid, I didn’t give a fuck. Now, I have more of an understanding of the cost of things and more understanding of my responsibility to myself, so I do have to contend with that, but I also have to make sure it doesn’t keep me from having any fun. I also have to be careful that I don’t spend too much time away from home, because I do get homesick and I don’t feel grounded without being there a fair amount of time. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

A lot of my fear of making music is actually the fear of the business of making music. It’s healthy to have some fear of the pitfalls therein, but not healthy to let it consume you. That’ll be the trick moving forward, and my “I’m not doing it if it isn’t fun” rule should help there, even if it makes me even more of a pain in the ass to the people who deal with me in the music world.

The mental and emotional cost of dealing with bureaucracy is still daunting (to go into more detail, it’s exhausting and demoralizing) to me, but I’m doing my best to confront it one tiny moment at a time.

I still dread telephone conversations. Some of that’s because I’ve had a lot of really rough phone conversations and some of it’s because I just don’t like the medium anymore. I’m doing my best to make the calls I need to, though.

I’ve spent a bunch of time this year organizing my affairs so that, if anything catastrophic happens to me, people will know what to do, but I’d say I’m probably about another year’s worth of work away from having it all make sense to folks, maybe two. That includes developing secure-ish ways for people who may need to access my accounts and such to do so, reducing clutter, having the things I decide to keep around make sense to someone who didn’t live my life, figuring out who gets what when it’s time to divide up my things and seeing to it that anything I’ve created and/or shared with people outlives me. I’m also looking into ways to help others outlive themselves digitally, but that’s still in the very early stages. If you’re a software or web site developer interested in this subject, get ahold of me and we’ll talk about it.

I’m learning to deal better with anticipation, to the point where I do actually manage to get some sleep on nights when I’m expecting something, even something good, to happen.

My hardest-to-resolve, fear-related issues are the following:

Money: I fear being broke for the obvious reasons, and I fear the illusion of not being broke, as leads me to spend impulsively and compulsively sometimes, in what I’d consider to be self-destructive ways. We’ll get to my plans for this in a minute.

Expectations: I’m always afraid that I’m not holding up my end of the bargain in life, or that I’m not living up to the expectations that the important people in my life have of me (or should have). The world at large, I don’t worry about much, as you can’t please everyone, but people who make a real, positive difference in my life, well, I want to do right by them, and I don’t always feel like I do, or, more specifically, like I do to the degree that I should. I’m learning to actually ask them what those expectations are, so I can at least worry about a known commodity rather than worrying about things that may all be in my head. This way, even if I do continue to panic about these things, I’ll at least be panicking about something real. I have serious issues with this, though

Regret: Regret keeps me awake at night. I don’t know how many of you live with regret, but I do. People have done much worse than I have in life, but that thought hasn’t helped me make peace with what I have done, or haven’t done. It’s stuff I can’t do anything about beyond making amends with people I feel that I’ve wronged and being the best person I can be moving forward, but it still gets its hooks into me all the time, and it’s painful. This is a lifelong struggle, and I think it’ll take work that I’m not sure how to do yet to get a handle on it. How do you deal with regret?

This Year’s Resolutions:

Beyond continuing to work on what I’ve made public for the past year privately, I’ve got two resolutions, ones that I won’t be burdening this site with for privacy as well as readability reasons, but important ones.

1. Save money and manage money better: I’ve experimented with a budget over the past year or two, but it’s not something I’ve done great with. I’ve also been saving, but not enough to put together a comfortable emergency fund or long-term savings. I intend to step up my game on both fronts. Wish me luck.

2. Do a better job of enjoying what I have: I’m really, really fortunate, despite all the obstacles in my life. Yet, I do a lousy job of enjoying, using, and appreciating the fortune at my disposal. I’m looking into a number of ways to remedy this, including a “Wheel Of Solitary Entertainment” to encourage me to read, listen to, watch and play with the things I’ve been hoarding for years rather than just sitting in front of a computer hitting “reload” all day, and I’m also looking at sites like Goodreads, I Heart Movies and Rate Your Music (perhaps not those exact sites, but at the very least, ones like them; stay tuned for more details) to help me catalog, share my insight on and enjoy what’s in front of me everyday. In addition, I’ll be stepping up my efforts to place things I’ll probably never get around to enjoying in the hands of folks who will. Again, wish me luck.

Thanks for enduring this yearlong experiment with me, and I hope that you’re able to stick to your guns on your various resolutions as well, regardless of whether they’re made on New Year’s Eve or not.