There’s no pressure to do anything, other than the pressure I put upon myself.

I used to struggle with high blood pressure, which I blamed on all the stress in my job. I had what I felt were a lot of responsibilities over a lot of things. I was technically responsible for a bunch of expensive equipment that stored a lot of sensitive data, the details of which don’t really matter.

There was a lot of stress in my life.

I can tell myself a story that “I’m not afraid of anything because I’m so tough,” or whatever, however if I’m suffering from stress, there is definitely some fear going on.

In my case, I was afraid that I would fail.

I feared that I might fail at some aspect of my responsibilities and lose actual data through equipment failure or a malicious attack. I could describe the “enemy attacking” in any number of ways, but the real fear for me wasn’t the enemy itself. In reality, I was always on guard for disaster, and very proficient at my tasks.

What I really feared was failure.

Underneath fear of failure was another fear, the fear of being cast out.

I feared failure because I felt the threat of abandonment from my community should I failed, and all of the shame that comes with that.

And because of that fear, I feared the system crashing, or hackers finding their way in.

But none of that fear was actually in the system.

It was in me.

Like all suffering, it was internally generated.