You frequently remind me of how susceptible I am
to the lies and truths which you expertly mix,
to make me believe you care about my person.
You successfully tell me that I cannot succeed,
You attach my worth to my success,
and tell me I don’t belong unless I win,
the biggest, brightest, most prestigious award.
You take my dreams and make me salivate for their passing,
but you destroy my inner peace to reach them,
staining my hopeful, optimistic dreams with blood.
You are in love with my insecurities because they are fuel,
they give you power to remind me of my weaknesses,
and you delight when I build high walls of shame around them.
You steal my sleep, you steal my joy and in return,
you replace my honest smile with a fake one,
you make me believe I’m the only one that matters.
You cannot co-exist with gratefulness and humility,
so you entangle me with malignant thoughts,
thoughts of scarcity, pride, and arrogance.
You convince me that I am not worthy of love,
Or of another’s time and energy,
And I believe you.
You love when I give you the time of day,
you love when I believe everything you say,
you delight in crippling me.
You horrid thing; you care nothing about me,
how dare I let you deceive me.
This is my time to look you directly, intensely,
in your fiery yellow, evil eyes,
and tell you that,
you……
lose.
Tales of a Sojourner 
Oh Kate. The battles I’ve fought with fear. I came to the realization about 16 years ago that I’m afraid almost all the time. That, in turn, made me angry. Very, very angry. The things I never dared because I was afraid! It was around that same time that the “NO FEAR” slogans became popular and were splayed across the back windows of trucks everywhere. As angry as I was at my fear, I could only shake my head in disbelief at this mindset. Can you imagine? You don’t have to imagine what it is to be cowed by fear, but imagine someone who actually lived without it. They wouldn’t live long, in all probability. Only a fool has no fear. I think of it now like fire. Fire is a very valuable tool–it’s heat can make the difference between life and death if you are in the wild, it can cook our food, it can light our way, it’s energy is an incredible power source, it serves as a great focal point around which stories can be told–but only if it is contained. When it escapes confinement, it is one of the most destructive forces in nature. The key is to be the fire’s master. Fear can be instructive, keep us alive, keep us grounded, but ONLY if it is kept in its place and we master it.
I appreciate the comment because I do agree that a type of fear is healthy… the fear that instils respect in us for things we should not touch, not do, not say. But this fear, the kind that I write of here, is the crippling, debilitating kind, the kind that keeps one from fully living and it is not a fear that I want to make friends with any longer.