It's February in Texas and the weather is perfect today, sunny and mild, and I'm sitting on my porch wondering how my internal state could be in such opposition to the beauty outside of me.
Today the war in my mind is loud, raging, raining fire and bombs and screams of death and destruction. the Fear has tightened it's grip on my heart, squeezing till all the passion and hope and life are drained out and pooled in some dark, unknowable corner of myself.
There's a plant on my porch directly across from me that I forgot to water for months: it is dry and cracked and withered, and and I look at in kinship, a fellow barren, beat-down life-form. "Me too, buddy," I say to the plant, "me too."
I understand what it feels like to want to lay down and give up, to be tempted follow that siren song to the edge of the cliff, even if I know I will be dragged under that dark water in the end. This place is one of uncertainty and dis-ease and I run back, like a scared child, to that which I know is safe and secure, all the while knowing that it will destroy me in the end. This is the place where I must decide, choose sides / this is what everything has been leading up to: do I go backwards, throw myself back to the waiting arms of the eating disorder? Back to a life of sickness that is predictable and numbing and cuts me off from my soul? Or do I break the cycle by moving towards the Fear, towards the giant grey unknown space in front of me to that which could potentially bring me LIFE - and, in that same breath, potentially also bring chaos and pain? I am afraid of everything that is in front of me right now and my instinct is to become small and disappear into nothingness and not face that which looms large in my mind.
I know the "right" answer, know the logical arguments, and, if I'm honest, I even know what my soul is telling me to do. But the Fear, the Fear, always the Fear: it eats away me, ripping through each argument with a solid dose of panic and BUT WHAT IFs. I am stuck in the in-between again, stretched thin between doing what every cell in my body believes is right and giving in to the overwhelming, far-reaching, all-consuming Fear.
I am frozen in time : frozen in fear : unable to move past this
