Hey Andrew,
I think this protective ‘shell’ is more common among us than we may think; more so if someone had a difficult childhood. This place was once described as tending to “veer into way too abstract territory quite quickly”, and I wondered if that is but an expression of this collective ‘shell’ (intellectualizing our experience is a way of keeping our feelings at arm’s length, as opposed to being sincere).
Vineeto’s encouragement to be more naive enabled me to begin to come out of this shell; the shell became porous, but it didn’t break until I fell in love and stayed with those feelings (the panic, it just turned out, was due to despair, which is my desperate claw-like control over my future) instead of running away, back into this shell and hope again. Despair hasn’t gone away yet; it exists physically in the belly, projecting the ‘future’ as bleak (thank you, Richard, for planting the “who died a lonesome bachelor” image in me). I’m trying to stay with it, to see what comes out of it … meanwhile, any tips will be appreciated.