The Fucken Barracuda
“I can’t help it, I keep thinking this is all fake, I’m going to fuck it up.” I say urgently requiring support and comfort from my best friend, Jenny.
“The fucken Barracuda again dude.” Jenny says exasperated.
A while ago on her honeymoon, she went snorkeling in Panama. As she swam alone, away from her husband, she came close to an ugly scary looking fish with fangs and teeth outside its’ mouth. She swam for her life away from the ugly fish not knowing what it was. As she found her husband, he was excited about spotting something and wanted to show her, he directed her in a different direction and pointed excitedly, big grin on his face. It was that scary fish again! She swam away quickly as she could as her husband followed, then telling her it was a Barracuda. As they approached the boat another one came close to them, she was freaked out by it, “couldn’t get away from that fucken Barracuda!” She told me. Since then we’ve termed issues or subjects we keep coming back to or can’t get away from ‘the fucken Barracuda’.
I have lived my life with the fucken Barracuda of self doubt, self deprecation, and diminished self-esteem. I have attempted many times to meet my dreams, goals and fantasies. Fantasies only by design of my self-belief or self-misbelief. I had a job I loved and screwed up by mind games of never being good enough and waited for a time I would screw up which eventually I did, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I quit not long after never finding out what my growth would have looked like there. Then there was the time I had a business idea I was getting close to bringing to life; received a negative comment from someone who had nothing to do with anything and I dropped the whole business plan like a tonne of bricks, never to resurface ever again. There was the dream of a new career I embarked upon and then didn’t think I was going to make it because I was a foreigner, because it had been many years since I worked in the field, because I was too old to start at the bottom in a new country. That dream never saw the light of day.
Yesterday I was talking to Jenny about this new venture in writing. No matter how many people give me good critique, I’m never fulfilled, never satisfied. I’m always looking for the person to say that it was terrible, perhaps then I would believe them. Imposter syndrome visited like an old friend, reminding me of all the failures of the past, minimized by the rationalization that those failures had something to do with my unmanaged illness. Supposing things are going well now, and my illness is managed, who’s to say it won’t go bad? And this won’t all turn into shit? Is my anxiety valid? Does anyone else in a position similar as mine feel this anxious?
I was having anxiety over my anxiety. This fucken Barracuda rears its head more often than I care to consider, yet it is the center of my world. Worrying about when bipolar will hit in any which direction was a constant, consistent, persistent obsession and fear of mine. I lived in fear of this Barracuda more than anything else for it determined the direction and extent to which my endeavors ever flow and glow. The glow of self achievement, one that is independent of my title as mother and wife and daughter, one that is of me as me has yet to be met. I meekly attempt, I timidly tread for fear of it all combusting into a flame of self delusion and self destruction.
Yet this time, I have kept trying, I’m writing drafts and editing drafts, writing blogs and editing blogs, I’m writing. I am a writer. I have been consistent in having output as frequently or infrequently I have managed. I have been persistent to achieve my goal of meeting the end of this process with my book on shelves of bookstores.
Perhaps the barracuda has turned in our conversations; as a notion of unfavorable persistence to be avoided and processed through. It possibly has transformed into something else. Something different, something powerful perhaps. Perhaps this fear of my illness being the obstacle that keeps me from my dreams has met its match in my current state of persistence. I have been talking about it routinely like I do whenever I am afraid. However this time it feels different. I have been in a reasonably comparable, longer state of stability with my treatment and consistent utilization of the tools in my toolbox to keep the mood swings in a manageable state.
Perhaps my time has come and the Barracuda of self-doubt, the Barracuda of Imposter Syndrome the Barracuda of anxiety over mental illness has finally met their match. The figurative definition of the Barracuda; an aggressive and fiercely determined person has taken over and now I am THE Barracuda, no longer afraid of the other fucken Barracudas that keep reappearing in circles around my life. I suppose we’ll come back to this if and when my book sits on bookstore shelves.