On Fear & Fragility

I want to share what's on my mind. The thing is, I wanted to tell you yesterday, and the day before that. My head aches (literally) with everything unsaid.

I've been afraid. Afraid to write. Even though I know it's what I'm meant to do. But my relationship to fear is changing.

Senseless violence struck again, so close to home this time that I'm forced to confront it, to acknowledge it as something more than an abstract horror happening elsewhere.

I realized in the sharpness of sudden clarity that I've been afraid of the wrong things.

Before I continue, I should explain that I'm obsessed with the idea of living up to my potential. I don't even know what my "potential" actually is, or what fulfilling it looks like, but I know it involves writing. And I know that I'm currently not living up to it.

You would think that something so intrinsic to who I am would be easy to express, but - through some combination of my lived experience, disordered thinking or cognitive distortions, maybe (probably) my genes, I've made writing this big threat and I've been paralyzed by it.

I thought I had to prove myself worthy of being read before I could say here, I wrote this, will you read it?

The closeness of this tragedy has jolted me to see a new perspective, to see how precarious, how fragile is our life.

How could I be afraid of embarrassing myself when the real fear is dying with everything I need to say going with me?
Does it really matter if my friends roll their eyes? Or secretly pity me because I'm actually a bad writer and how sad that is, that I think I'm meant to do this, how pathetic.
How can I leave yet another page unpublished when Seraphina is pushed in her stroller along that same crosswalk every day?
When they missed the bullet by less than an hour?
The kind indifference of time.
The cruel indifference of time.
I read today that they found 27 shell casings. But they didn't find the men who fired bullet after bullet after bullet after bullet after bullet...

It's as simple as this: someone lost her life, so for a second I feel more grateful for mine. I feel relief. And if we owe the dead anything, isn't it our lives?

There is a deeper me inside of me, a deeper self, who insists on her voice.
Hour after hour, I quell her urgency and insistence with the promise of tomorrow, of someday, of time.
By pushing the idea off, by not writing today, I'm assuming I have tomorrow, that I have time.

So, why am I writing to you? Who am I to think my voice deserves to be heard?

The uncertainty of safety makes me somehow more confident to write. I could laugh at the things I've been fearing.

What reason do I need?
I want to live.