Loving My Fears

Over the past month and a half I've allowed my carved out writing time to get whittled away. Some of it was necessary, my restless anxiety drove me as I worried and sweated my way through my parents coming to visit. I needed exercise and activity, art journalling and photography.

All those doing things kept me out of trouble. I didn't eat my feelings, or go back to self-injury. I didn't have that one glass of wine to take the edge off that spirals into a daily practice.

Now it's time to bring life back into a place of balance. For words to be spilled not only in texts and journals, but in book outlines, blog posts, and chapters. I'm reminded that I have the choice here. I can choose to make myself sit here and write, giving my editor permission to take a coffee break.

Even when I do carve time out for me to write, I choose all the distractions. Resistance doesn't get to win this war though. So I'm showing up, to sit down and to write damn it. To write until my words flow again. To write one word and then the next. And if all my words are about how damned impossible it feels to write words, then so be it.

The deeper my writing goes, the quieter I get. In part because deep things tend to need whispers, not roars. But the bigger part is that I'm scared. I keep seeing over and over this year how fear runs my life. It's not rational. It's understandable. And I'm learning to love myself because I believe that love is the antidote for my fear. Love that keeps showing up, that affirms, instead of passing judgement. Love that chooses to stay, to sit with the fear, allowing it to be heard yet again. Love that returns time and again to the empty page, the blinking cursor. Love that holds fear's hand for as long as is necessary.

It means that even in this place of fighting for my words, I am choosing to not fight against my fear. My fear is a part of who I am. I don't like it, I wish that it wasn't there, but fighting it hasn't worked. I'm choosing acceptance of what I cannot change. I cannot change that I was raised in a world where I was taught to fear everyone and every thing. I cannot change that I have C-PTSD and along with that comes anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and worry about my safety.

What I can change here is my response to fear.  I can breathe love and acceptance into my bones - love from others, love from myself. And one day I know that all that love will have absorbed some of those fears.