Tag: fear

Do I remember how to do this?

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

Months away from the creative page.
The desire to make things
or express myself with words
evaporated and melted away
like the unseasonably warm weather of these winter months
kept the snow away
and prevented it from returning to stay.

I cannot find the words to convey the depths of pain and grief and depression and anxiety and ambivalence and change and interspersed joy that have filtered through and between the days of recent months.

I could not imagine what such words would look like, sounds like, spell like, write like or hear like, so it seemed worthless to spend any amount of time before a blank page, hoping for the imagining to come to me.

The thought of spending time before a blank page cascaded waves of fear, discomfort and vulnerability through every tissue of my body, maintaining distance between us.

I have felt vulnerability before, even embraced walking alongside it. But this felt different. It was vulnerability in a new form, a more terrifying form, and I chose to stay away for what I believed to be my own self-protection.

Last weekend, in the midst of an anxiety attack, I tried to color in a coloring book with pencil crayons, reasoning that the act of coloring would distract and calm my mind. Instead, my anxiety amplified. Fears of choosing the right picture (not too complex but not too simple), fears of choosing the right colors, fears of coloring too faintly, too intensely or beyond the lines, fears of choosing colors to live next to each other that do not complement. Questioning why I am limited to the colors chosen to be within this collection of pencils. Questioning why I need to adhere to rules and lines and systems laid out by an entity separate from myself. After ten minutes, I abandoned the effort.

I want to stand before a giant white canvas and throw globs of paint upon it, then wave a brush to spread them all around under the guide of exploration and curiosity. I want to get my hands messy. I don’t want to abide by arbitrary rules that tell me what’s right and what’s wrong with my exploration of self. I want to translate myself into colors and textures and images that words cannot always adequately capture within themselves. I am evolving. I am expanding.

I must believe
I am strong enough
to rise up against any tribulation
threatening to pull me down
and keep me there.

I have to trust
that I have the means within me
to face each new situation
in the moment.
It’s somewhere deep inside of me
waiting to rise when the time is right;
the knowing of what to do.
All I need to do is trust.

Trust that evolution
is a celebration
and a journey with no finish line.

I must trust that I remember how to do this,
and will remember how to do this
when I need to.

decisions on instinct

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

My therapist
encouraged me to practice making decisions
faster
and based on my instincts.
Not every decision needs to be
weighed and analyzed
for hours
before reaching a conclusion –
a novel concept
for my brain to comprehend.

I took her advice;
I could hear her voice in my head
gently pushing me
out of my head
and into my body.

Warm air, sunshine-soaked sky
lured me to be outside
and move,
while listening.
I want to walk through the park,
I want to explore a new trail,
I want to recreate a small sliver of wild
I chase and revel in elsewhere.

I laugh at myself
as I walk along the trail
at this series of decisions
being the most impulsive I have been
in months.

When did I become so scared of living?

Acknowledgement is the first step

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

My mind feels full.

Full of characters:
their personalities,
their thoughts,
and dialogue exchanged with others.

Full of phrases
simple and complex
to live in stories
or essays
or poems.

Full of scenes
replaying in memoried fragments
requesting reimagination
and depersonalization.

To empty my mind
on to the page
requires a vulnerability
that, right now,
feels insurmountable.
Fear of pain, of exposure,
of inadequately capturing
my imagination
with words.

Acknowledgement is the first step.

no more holding back

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

I’m no longer interested
in holding back.
No more keeping things in my head.
I will write them all out,
release them all,
put everything I have into this story,
leave my whole heart out on the table.

There’s nothing for me to be afraid of
except myself
and I’m done with that.

No more holding back.

Noticing

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

Noticing
my wanting
to cross items off my to-do list.

Noticing
my yearning
to announce a project as complete.

Noticing
my fear
of diving into waters of vulnerability
when I feel fragile.

Noticing
my tendency
to want to do the easy things
rather than the hard and messy things.

Noticing
my hesitancy
with meeting new facets of me
and letting the old ones go.

Noticing
the discrepancies between
what I claim to desire
and the actions I take.

Noticing.

numbness remains

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

I want to talk about what happened
but I fear it will hurt too much
to re-enter that space now,
days later,
like traveling back in time
to feel those thoughts and feelings again
so I can write about them.

I don’t know how
to assign words, to gift cadence,
to those moments of emotional overwhelm.
But I will try.

My lungs shriveled up like raisins
in a rubble-piled chest
unable to take a full, deep, expansive breath
for three days.

My heartbeat slowed as my nerves turned numb
retreating from sensation
towards any stimulation.

The panic, the pain,
the fear rose above me like a tidal wave
and crashed,
holding me down, in the water
and thrashing currents,
tossing my body as though it were
nothing more than a thin branch
broken off from a shoreline tree
in the wind.

I felt it all
in real time
for days.

The fear, pure and raw,
scared me the most
ironically.

Now, these days later,
my lungs are plump grapes
eager and able to take deeper breaths.
The panic, pain and fear
have settled like sand at the bottom of the ocean,
but the numbness remains,
uncertain if it’s supposed to dissipate naturally with time
or if its lingering presence signifies
issues remaining unresolved.

The more I talk about it,
the more I write about it,
the harder it becomes to dismiss
the truth pulsing through my blood.
The truth cannot be avoided forever;
it will not dissipate with time.

I must continue talking about it
I must continue writing about it
I must continue revisiting the vulnerability
of sitting in the spaces of purity
to understand,
and to move forward.

nature defies stagnancy

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

It does little good to plan out ahead of time
how events will transpire
when you do not know
outside of this moment,
anything.

Everything changes. Change is the constant.
From minute to minute
we are reborn.

We may look ahead to the waters we can see
on our projected path
but have you never seen
the unrelenting evolution of water,
its constant movement,
even when the surface appears to be still
enough to resemble glass?
The waters will change by the time you get there,
as will you,
so tell me, what the point is, in
trying to plan and control for things
that do not and may never exist?
Those who attempt this control
allow heartbreak and anxiety and fear
to anchor them in the water,
though the waves and currents and flow of life persist;
nature defies stagnancy.

Relinquish the need for control
and watch the anchors reel back up into the boat.
Allow movement and fluidity and
uncertainty to become your allies.
You can trust them, wholeheartedly,
they will not abandon you
nor lead you to harm.

Trust in the constant of change:
the only constant we know.

end with me

~ jennadawn ~ Leave a comment

Most of what I live in fear of,
in the shadows of anxiety
are circumstances fabricated by my mind.
They come from within me,
my own doing,
and break me.

If they come from me
they can end with me too.