Catch up Day #2 Blog Prompt

Day 2: Describe 3 legitimate fears you have and describe how they became fears.

EDIT: This post did NOT post when written and saved as draft.  Sorry for the out-of-order-ness!

This is hard because I'm just going to get really honest.

1.  I'm afraid I will never get a nursing job that I love.  I'm afraid that I won't make it as far as I want.  I owe SO MUCH MONEY in student loans, I'm afraid that when I want to go back for my Master's that I won't be able to afford it.  I want to help people with addiction.  So MANY people are coming into treatment centers, as young as 18, and I want to help them.  Most people don't understand it.  It's not about the drugs.  It's starts as something to numb the pain, or to "feel better" for awhile.  It can even be fun.  But the more you do it, the more you want.  Because you don't want to feel bad, and all drugs (except pot, I don't know because I never smoked a lot) can make you depressed, and cause chemical imbalances in the brain, which make you crave substances.  You start to feel that "normal' is only when you are taking something.  I want people to know, there's a way out, and this disease can affect ANYone.  Doctors, nurses, surgeons, lawyers, government officials, teachers, teenagers, people can start in their 50s.  You have to do some major work with your life, but it's possible.  I know my addiction started in my teenage years in the form of eating disorders.  I am NOT saying they are the same thing, or related, I'm just speaking from my experience.  Addicts are people that have to keep doing something they love, such as video games.  I can sit for 15 hours straight and play video games.  I love video games, so I will abuse anything I like to the extreme.  (I have played video games for that long when I was younger).  The disease is progressive and fatal if not arrested.  This makes me A LOT different from most of the bloggers I read.  I can be severely judged for this, and I hope that I'm not.  I hope that people will see that I'm making a better life for myself.  I NEVER wanted to be like this, and I went through a lot of guilt, shame, and self-hatred, which kept me using.  Thank God, I got clean and stayed clean. SO that leads to number 2, since I basically went to the next one in the middle of THIS fear.....

2.  Relapse.  I have "resigned" from two jobs because of my opiate addiction.  I'm in a special program that oversees my recovery to make sure I'm safe to practice as a nurse.  I've been clean and sober-not a drink, not a pill, no cough syrup, nothing that contains alcohol-which is food, cleaning products, hand sanitizer, or beauty products, no sleeping pills, no caffeine pills-for over 2.5 years.  It will be 3 years in July.

3.  I'll lose my daughter.  This is an irrational fear.  This may be because I lost my sister.  If I lost Ash, I don't know what I would do.  I would feel so horrible and bad, I think I would be heartbroken and lose the desire to live.  Especially if she was murdered.  Sometimes my thoughts race about this, and I cry.  I couldn't imagine losing her.  I feel like I already lost my sister, than maybe I'll be safe from losing my daughter.  But realistically, anything can happen to anyone at any time, and life from there on is different.  What if she got into a car accident and wasn't able to communicate or talk again?  My heart hurts SO much when I think about this stuff.

So those are 3 of my fears.  They can be really intense, especially the 3rd one.