Fear: The Monster You Love To Stare At But Are Actually Terrified Of.
Writer’s block.
I’ve had months of it. Don’t get me wrong - i’m sure if I wanted to, I might have (we will never know). But where there had once been a raging furnace, a passion for lexicon, zeal, I had watched it, over the years, become a flicker of a flame. I convinced myself it was because of this and because of that and of course I can do it another time. Even - I can’t do everything at once! These excuses were the mist over an already extinguishing flame. I stared this evaporation in the face, daily. Breathed it in. The poetry of staring at yourself deeply and wondering where the hell is all this void coming from am I having a mid life crisis in my 20s, staring and scrolling through reams of the instaverse, constantly consuming, thinking less and saying more to keep up with the attention deficient generation of right now. Cold sweats and armoury, fighting huge words with my hands; my brand and grid aesthetic and how do I monetise every second of my life so I can feel like my life means something.
Do our lives still mean something when no one is watching?
Do we believe in our selves just as much when the world is silent?
For most of us, fear is an insidious partner. Hidden in the ways you change how you speak to yourself, the ways you perceive, how you say yes and say no. How you compare. (Oh, i’m not judging you - I do it too). And especially in - God forbid - a pandemic. What is there not to fear?
Six months ago, I had an epiphany: Fear is a choice.
Sure: Fear is the first lie that promises us security. Examples: My fear means that what feels out of control doesn’t have to be. I can say no. I can avoid people. I can not bother trying. I can lie about how i’m really doing. Thoughts become chains, linked and arranged in rows like seeds in a field, wilted by a harsh sun, choking in a barren land, never to harvest. Fear feels good, sometimes. Fear feels like order.
But as long as we are afraid, we cannot be free. Even a false sense of security has its limitations. The question I have come to ask myself is, do you want freedom from your fear? And: Can you live again in a land that looks different to the one you had planted in, believing there will be a harvest?
The concept of ‘new land’ is one I can’t shake these days. New land could be anything. A new job, a new chapter, a new identity, a new habit, a new physical location, a new responsibility, a new process, a new home. But when the appointed time to move to that land and leave the current one comes - you know that feeling, when there’s something in your bones you can’t shake - will you leave what you have come to know behind?
What will be your choice?
My choice is to get up and move. I finally understood that to become everything I am (and I believe that being is an ever evolving state + you cannot know your full self outside of the loving, creating God who transcends time), my choices needed to be seriously, seriously reassessed.
I used to imagine this sort of process would be nothing short of chaos. But instead, I found silence. Quite rapidly, I became cocooned within my own self. I left social media, I prayed prayers, I have tried (and failed) many times to change my habits and be conscious of my choices. Why do I behave the ways I do? Why do I eat the ways I do? Cue switching over to a vegetarian diet, and realising how indisciplined I had been with the ways I nourished my body over the years. How this extended so easily to emotional and mental and spiritual (mal)nourishment. This is the healing I never knew to ask for, the kind that presses down and shakes you from the inside and out.
I am not the woman I was 6 months ago. I am not even the woman I was 12 months ago. But in all the change, I see that my battle was not against the ‘smaller stuff.’ My fight has been against fear. It’s been so hard to get up and walk again. But i’m doing it, and everything has and is changing. And a lot of things have clicked:
I do not have writer’s block: I am afraid to write and it be counted for nothing.
I do not have apathy: I am afraid to believe and hope again, so long as they are shadowed by the threat of disappointment.
I have not lost my self: I am afraid to feel and see my next evolution and have to deal with feeling inadequate or overwhelmed by the thought of how to get there.
I have not run out of time and options: I am afraid to fail so stopped trying.
Fear was my monster. It knew my dances, my airs and graces. What I know now, is that Fear will only dance to the tune you have given it. It will only walk on the paths you create for it. And there is nothing Fear loathes more, than when we say No. Enough.
It is enough.
Will you walk to your new land?
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