Welcome To The Uncomfortable Zone

On my first night in India I suffered a good old-fashioned full-blown anxiety attack.  In the middle of the night.  In the dark.  I have only had a few of these in my natural-born life and I can say with a great deal of honesty that they're not a lot of fun.  It's kind of taking a normal amount of anxiety over an understandable situation and then compounding it with all kinds of weird, implausible anxieties until there's a huge ball of jangled nerves bashing against each other.  I enjoy doing different things from time to time but I hope it's a while before I have another one of these.  

I could feel my mind piling on.  It's hard to get the mind to shut down when it's on a paranoid roll.  I began to take totally trivial worries and blowing them up until they were monstrous in size.  I was awake for a number of hours once things got rolling, unable to dissociate from what I logically knew were illogical.  Momentum can be a terrible thing.

Welcome to pushing the comfort zone.  From time to time I push right on through to the uncomfortable zone.  Well, so be it.  That's the price that has to be paid from time to time if I want to be comfortable with myself.  Long ago SuperK and I were in Italy and we had to arrange for a couple of train rides to get to Venice, which we very much wanted to see.  We were new to traveling and the prospect was so daunting that we almost didn't go.  One of us said: "I'd hate to think we're going to miss Venice because we're afraid of a train ride."  The trip was fun, Venice was great, and we haven't looked back since.