Fears

In that space between sleep and consciousness, I entered the early morning with my mind repeating and chewing on the phrase, “it causes me fear that…” Before falling asleep the night before, I had gone through a stack of pages pulled from past journals. Each short phase of my life seems to fit perfectly between cardboard covers. Grocery lists, passing thoughts, fragments of memoir or poetry– all confined within a small book that encapsulates an experience through a certain period of time. In my Thailand notebook, I found a page defining what stability meant for me (done so at a friend’s urging), as well as a list of my desires and my fears.

On revisiting the latter, I sucked in my breath as I realized every single fear had come to fruition, mere months after writing them down. Did I see my future coming or did it pen it into being? (Perhaps a bit of both.)

That moment was first weighted in failure– until I realized that I had faced every single one of those fears and survived. Life hasn’t always been easy as I’ve moved back and forth across the globe, but I’ve earned a million experiences I would never give back and saw, firsthand, the power of my own resiliency.