Monday, March 19, 2007

When it's hard to choose love over fear...

Just this moment I decided to add another blog ... it's that whole procrastination thing ... but I had writer's block. I looked out my window (which is really a big sliding glass door) and received inspiration as I watched my roommate start climbing over the gate that leads to our patio that leads to the big sliding glass door which could easily be broken or broken into ... that's probably not what I want to be thinking about when I just learned my friend was assaulted by an intruder in her home.

I know that these things happen and am actually terrified whenever I have to stay the night in my home alone. I wake up on those mornings with a sense of relief that the night passed uneventfully and the day is here. It's worse at night, but I get scared during the day, too. I was unloading my truck yesterday morning and accidentally left the garage door open when I took everything upstairs. It was all I could do not to call the police when I realized the door had been open for up to 30 minutes unattended. That my bike was still in the garage and my dog hadn't barked the house down helped me relax and just close the damn door.

I'm not constantly quaking in my pansy pink booties, but these fearful thoughts enter my head on a regular basis throughout the day. I check that all doors are locked, put my faith in something and just keep going. I don't walk down dark alleys alone at night, but neither do I avoid taking my dog out for a pee at 3am when the bar across the street is long closed and the drunks and crazies are still about. What I'm trying to explain is that I have a heightened level of vigilance, but I try not to let it affect my options in life.

I was going to wax philosophical about this being a difference between men and women - that men don't have to be as constantly on guard as women - but it occurs to me this is not a male-female issue, but a minority issue. Any non-majority group or persecuted group can probably understand this feeling very well ... gay, person of color, women, fat, nerdy ... I guess we're all subject to the vagaries of human conscience that allow another human being to willfully hurt us. For now, I'm just happy that my boyfriend is a door locker, too, even though I laughed when he made a point of locking the car doors when we were scooting down the freeway at 85mph - maybe he knows something I don't know.

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