A few weeks ago, I read about a Dutch doctor who is using therapy and medication to erase people’s fears.  It sounds a little too-good-to-be true, but even the New York Times has written about her work.  She shows the person the thing they fear and gives them the beta blocker propranolol immediately after.  Their brain rewrites the fear with a new, neutral memory.

I am deeply interested in trying this.

I think it would work both because it works and because I want it to work.  It would be so much nicer to live my life without fears.  I have a bunch, most of them irrational.  My life would be better if I didn’t have them, though I’m not sure how to get rid of some of them because they’re not objects or animals.  They’re possibilities.  How do you undo a fear of a possible future event?

Something in one of the articles gave me pause: “Some people feel a sadness after they’re cured,” Kindt warns me. “A part of you is gone — even though the phobia was unpleasant, it was part of who you were.”

I don’t think I would be sad to lose my fears, though I guess I wouldn’t know until I was sad.  Though the New York Times article points out that you’re still you and you still have your memories: “The subjects knew perfectly well after the study that they previously feared spiders and that they now — strangely — felt little to no anxiety around them.”

I’m not seeing the drawbacks as long as your memory is intact and you’re not erasing a helpful fear.  But maybe I just haven’t thought deeply enough about the consequences of this because I’m so enamoured with the possibilities.

If you were given the chance to do this and permanently get rid of an on-going fear, would you take it?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I eat almost all the foods that put us in a bad mood.  I don’t know if there are more on the list because the actual book isn’t out until September, but if these seven are the focus of the book, I’m making some pretty poor life choices.

I’ve actually cut out diet soda for the most part.  I was having at least one glass per day, but I haven’t bought it in months.  Though I use artificial sweeteners in my coffee, so… I’m still getting the worst part of the diet soda.  I also use margarine when I’m baking pareve.  (Which is just a kosher way of saying it’s non-meat and non-dairy.)  Butter isn’t an option, so that wasn’t a very helpful suggestion.

I tend to bake my own sweets and we never get fast food (going back to that whole kosher thing).  But I love salty snacks (especially pretzels… mmm…).  And I use canned tomatoes all the time.  And cereal (though my main one, Special K, is on the correct side of the sugar limit).  So let’s say I semi-regularly consume 4 of the 7 and I hit 6 of the 7 on a monthly basis?

Crap.

How did you do with the bad mood food list?

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I sometimes bookmark things that I know I’m going to love and save them to read when I can fully concentrate.  Which is why I only read this essay about miscarriage in Catapult months after it was posted.  It’s a hard read.  I still think you should read it.

It begins with her second loss, back pedaling to frame this second miscarriage through the lens of the first one.  She writes, “How do we begin to hope when hope has wrought crushing disappointment in our lives?”  How do you continue to believe it will happen for you when you’ve received so much evidence to the contrary?  Or, “I thought how unfair it was that that bedspread had outlived our child, and some but not all of my hope died, like depleting power in a video game.”  We have hope until it’s all drained away.  And then it’s game over.

The essay doesn’t have a neat ending.  She is pregnant and the baby is probably here by now, though there is no neat wrap up to her words, no relief that it all worked out.  This is about the actual cost of hope, what it means to hope, why we sometimes protect ourselves from hope.  Like I said, a hard read.  But I still think you should read it.

In honour of the 700th Roundup (really 600th due to misnumbering), I’m asking YOU to comment with a link to a post that has stuck with you.  It can be your post or someone else’s post.  It can be written any time within the last 12 years.  (The first Roundup was on July 21, 2006.)

Leave a link and an explanation for why this post resonated with you, just like the regular Roundup.  Once you leave your post, go and peruse everyone else’s post.

If you’re posting more than one, please put them in individual comments (not bunching them into one comment).  And, yes, the more the merrier so post as many as you wish in separate comments.

This is mine to kick things off:

I’ve thought often about Toddler Planet’s “It’s Not Fair” since she wrote it back in 2011.  And I return to read it again and again as a reminder of how to get through life with grace.  She wrote it about six months before she died from metastatic breast cancer.  These lines may not make sense without reading the longer parable contained in the post, but I think about them all the time: “We each get one life, one daily wage, and that’s it.  The guy next door gets one life to live.  The mom down the street gets one too.  No one ever promised us the same life, the same opportunities, the same blessings, or the same time to live.  No one ever promised that.  We are promised one opportunity, one life, and how we live it is between us and our Creator (I believe).  There is no comparing.”  She did a lot of amazing things while she was on this planet, and I’m eternally grateful for her writing that put the imbalance of the world into perspective gave a frame for considering all moments.  I hope this post changes your life, too.

I cannot wait to see what you guys post.  Give us posts to read to celebrate the weekly Roundup!

There is nothing good about the two week wait.  It’s Schrödinger’s pregnancy; you are and you aren’t, and waiting to know is agony.

I think that interaction with waiting created other negative feelings about waiting that have bled into the rest of my life.  I’m not a big fan of inaction.  I want to do things now.  I want to know answers now.  I tend to address things and take care of things immediately.  I do not like to waste time.

Tiny Buddha had an essay about the power of waiting that begins with this thought, “Waiting has a bad rap in modern Western society.”  We’re more seize the day, “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” sorts of people.

The author states: “I really didn’t know much about waiting. I thought it was something you did if you didn’t have courage or conviction. It was just an excuse not to take action. I know better now … The mind hates uncertainty, and would rather make a mistake than simply live in a state of ‘not knowing’ while the right course unfolds.”

It’s a hard concept to wrap your brain around; waiting instead of doing.  Believing that it’s okay to hold back; that you’ll end up where you want to if you do.  It is the exact opposite of what is ingrained through infertility: Start now.  Continue even if you’re exhausted.  Time is of the essence.

And maybe some of that is true with family building.  Time isn’t your friend.  But holding onto that idea and bringing it into the rest of my life maybe isn’t the best course of action.  This essay gave me a lot of food for thought.

Do you think the two week wait influenced your relationship with waiting?