The gift of fear

Today, I choose to see you as a gift.

The obsession with the past

this fear that feels dark and alive inside me

Today I’m trying something new.

Instead of fighting you, being afraid of you I’ll look at you

and say thank you.

Thank you for the dread and terror and tears.

Thank you for all the glaring red warnings and the throbbing in my head.

THank you for all the months spent with you rolling around in my skull

like a loose screw I can’t find – an itch I can’t locate to scratch

because it’s buried so deep beneath my skin.

Thank you for your companionship.

The hours we’ve spent riding the bus together

walking to work, buying groceries, driving

fading off in the middle of a sentence

showing up mid-conversation, midday, midnight

Thank you for the times you’ve surprised me when I thought you were gone.

Thank you because without you, how would I know what love is?

What comfort really feels ike?

What bravery really is?

How would I understand courage without you?

You are the key to freedom

Not getting over you – not defeating you, but living with you. Cohabitating.

Not kicking you out but accepting that you’re here.

Finding a way to love you and your desperate search for certainty.

Without you, I wouldn’t be able to find that place of kindness and wisdom

that lives in my rib cage, cradling my heart.

I choose this.

I choose to see you as a gift

The gift of peaceful warriorship

The gift of light (blue cracking through a cloud-layered sky).

I feel better or worse, moment to moment

but you are teaching me

You are taking me where I need to go

leaving breadcrumbs that say follow the fear.

I’m sorry for the times when I’ve hated you.

I’m sorry for the times I’ve beat you up.

I’m sorry that sometimes I don’t know how to be nice to you.

Thank you for showing me that the way through fear IS fear.

Thank you for showing me the color, the texture of my own mind.

I am scared. I am weary. I am crying sometimes.

Sometimes I wish for a pill that would wash all of this away.

Sometimes I want to run into someone’s arms and say make it better

But fear. You stab me in the heart and turn my limbs to ice and and you say

the way is through me, not around.

And I shake and I cry and I beg you to leave me alone.

But today, I’m trying something new.

I’m saying thank you

for the gift that will someday lead me to knowing

and being at peace with my own mind.