sreda, 9. marec 2011

Fear of kurents

Yesterday was the last day to “drive away” the winter. This is Slovenian tradition every year, when people dress themselves up in costumes and that kind of things. This lasts from Saturday to Tuesday and there are also kurents (this is traditional mask in Slovenia and people are dressed in sheepskin and they have huge cow bells all around their waists and a big mask on their heads) who are involved in this carnival every year. 


 They are collecting hankies from women and they don’t go away if they don’t get it. And nowadays people don’t carry fabric hankies anymore…anyways… Every time when I hear bells from kurent or when I see one I get a strange feeling in my stomach and it is because of the fear. I am afraid when they are close to me because I find their masks very scary looking and the expressions on the masks are like angry and mean. When they were passing by, I was very stiff and I was standing there like a statue because I thought that if I make myself “unnoticeable”, standing in the background (preferably behind some big man) that they won’t bother me or noticed me. 


Also, a memory came up then from my childhood and I remembered that we (my family) were going somewhere and I was dressed in a costume and it was really freezing outside (I remember a big pile of snow outside the building) and kurents came. It was dark and they were even scarier in the dark…so they were fooling around when suddenly two kurents lifted my sister in the air and throw her in that pile of snow. I was soooo scared because I didn’t understand why they would do that and I was scared because I thought that they would do something to my sister and I was also afraid that I was next to go into that snow…I can still see this memory in the pictures in my head like it is real…
Then, while I was trying to sleep, I started wondering that I live in a constant fear. It is insane how fear controls me in almost every moment of my life. So I started to pay attention more on my fears. And they are basically everywhere…    

četrtek, 3. marec 2011

Different looking situations are sometimes the same

I finally wrote an email to my professor yesterday, because I need someone to be my mentor for my diploma. Every week I said to myself that I will write him on Monday because I always thought that everything starts with a new week or a new month or a year. So I have been postponing this for a few months now because I didn’t want to get obligated by anything (if I decide to write him and ask him for mentorship, then I have to do certain things by date and I was afraid of that because deadlines are making me nervous and worried). So, the fear is the main reason why I didn’t write him for so long. Also I wanted to be worries-free and do what I wanted to do – have time for myself and enjoy by doing nothing. I have a tendency in doing things at the last moment. I remember at high school and also grammar school, I always studied last day before the exam and I was really nervous a whole week before the exam because I knew that I have to study and I knew that I won’t be studying anything before the last day and because of that I won’t have enough time to go through all the material. But still (even though I knew that, I didn’t study before it was getting critical) I was very precise when learning the material, going in every detail, not wanting to skip “unimportant” information and because of that, I often didn’t manage to go through all the material. And this happened for all the exams – the same thing over and over again. And this would happen also in this case with my diploma. I have just noticed that when something needs to be done I have a lot of resistance within me to just get up and do it. For example I have to clean my room because it is in mess and I just postpone cleaning every day - saying to myself that I will do it next day. But when I finally decide to clean it, I then do the job with a high level of precision (the exact same thing like when studying)…very interesting…and also a feeling of anxiety is there every time when something like this is happening (few days before I decide to just do the damn thing).  Same feelings and emotions in that kind of situations which are also exactly the same  situations if I look at this from the whole perspective. Wow…