Right now, the country is quaking, hungry, often violent, overcome with threats. Politics, systems, and rules have suddenly changed lives and livelihoods. In the world we inhabit, there is a raw wind that can blow inside your chest as blood runs hot, hyper-vigilant, flooded.
This glowering presence, like a poison, can sweep through your body with its undeniable contraction. Fear is a mind killer, spreading through the veins and the bones, reminding us of all that has betrayed us. It can manifest as anger and vitriol, or as a deadening cloud on the soul. You—generous or kind, or terrified, most need one another and the best from yourselves.
For many of you, this is nothing new. As a survivor, you have certainly lived in such experiences. Diminishment, neglect, estrangement… abuse. Fear was embedded, and vigilance became hyper vigilance. Isolation, compromise or capitulation—making yourself small may have created the illusion of security even when it was not safe. But none of us can hide from the world indefinitely and pretend that what happens outside does not touch us. In these times of instability, you may not know how to calm your bleating beating heart. You may be filled with the confusion of it all.
But I repeat what has been said many times before:
Even when there seems no respite or resolution, there is a window. In fact, it may be through the same portal that your fear resides. Perhaps now, this is a time for you like no other. Perhaps now is the time that calls forth something you did not recognize that was always inside your bones, your nerves, and your heart.
You can be angry. You can be full or empty. You can be confused, enraged, numb. You can be quaking. But you don't have to be alone because you are not alone in this. And you may need to be afraid and proceed, nonetheless. No matter how you proceed, you can be true to what you believe and who you are. You can make your statements aloud or simply and truly live your life—no one else’s.
There will be losses and challenges. You may be confronted, challenged—perhaps threatened, no matter what your position. When we say there is skin in the game you may need to shed that skin—but please do not rip it to shreds. Your emotional skin protects you. Your vigilance enables you to stay safe. But now something deeper may call forth your courage.
Remember all you have lived through. You know this enemy of fear because it was used again and again. Yet you are still here, perhaps more yourself than what you ever knew yourself to be.
Listen.
Hold your younger self close to your heart, as you could hold a quivering child, tender and strong in the face of the unknown. Perhaps you did not experience when you were young. But when you love this child unconditionally, you move toward the threat as fierce protector not cringing away as a cowering capitulator. Here you are, true to yourself, even if you quake, doing or speaking or living like you never could before.
Listen.
Here you are, unafraid to be terrified of what you discover in that listening, seeing yourself with kindness and respect, even the parts of yourself (or others) that you do not like or understand. Nobody needs to tell you to not to be afraid. There was and is much that challenges all of us. Hold that little one close and forgive yourself for carrying any inherited poison of fear all these years.
You still may be afraid, yet relieved in what you discover in your listening, seeing in yourself a fierce kindness, even for parts of you that you were conditioned to dislike or misunderstand. Nobody can tell you or that scared part of you not to be afraid, but you still go forward true to your own spirit. It takes a special kind of courage. It may not be easy to hold on or to let go, and only you know how best to proceed. It has been a big part of your recovery as a survivor.
Forgive yourself for carrying the inherited poison from all you have taken on. It may not be easy to do—to hold or to let go. But that is where the healing and your power is.
For, “You are not my shadow any longer. I won’t hold you in my hands. You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice my belly, or in my heart, my heart my heart my heart.”
(This is the fierce life force that you have always possessed: your heart, your heart, your heart...)
“But come here, fear. I am alive and you are so afraid of dying."¹
Listen...
¹Harjo, Joy. (2012). “I Give You Back.” Crazy Brave. W. W. Norton & Company