It Is Just Fear

My fear is grey. It is like a cloud, it caresses me. Haunts me. Stands in the way.

I am starting to build my own business. It is going rather slowly. I am trying to improve my singing. That, too, is going rather slowly. I am trying to be a better writer, to publish more, to finally start the book. This, too, is going rather slowly.

Fear.

Greyness. Blindfolds.

It is there.

This morning I could have started with the tasks I had set out to do. Instead, I scrolled. I looked for a new pair of shoes I didn’t need. Wasted an hour, maybe two. I am not satisfied with saying that I procrastinated. Procrastination doesn’t spring out of blue air. There is a cause.

I closed my laptop and sighed.

Overthinking is never going to save me. Singing and meditation have taught me to drop deeper into my body, to feel where it is tense, or anxious, or angry. Overthinking doesn’t do the job. It traps me in spirals.

Drop. I needed to drop out of the head and into the body.

I sat down. Cross-legged. Closed my eyes, breathed.

Give me a moment. Just a moment.

I sighed. But I couldn’t breathe in properly. I took a deep breath through the nose, and I wanted it to travel down, deeper, into my lower belly. It didn’t. It cracked, it stuttered, it flailed a little, like it was shaken, and somewhere in my chest it escaped, and I let it out.

My thoughts were there too, planning, scheduling, worrying, trying to perfect one thing and then the other. While my breath was still stuck somewhere in the upper region of my chest.

One could think, watching my thoughts alone, that I was being productive. It looks like work. It isn’t. My breath knew better. It showed me what my thoughts were built to hide: I didn’t feel safe. And when the body isn’t calm, how is it supposed to do work that feels uncertain?

I sat there, cross-legged still.

Fear. This is fear. I am afraid.

Once I gave words to the feeling in my body, my breath noticeably eased. Breath by breath it travelled deeper, and with it, more clarity.

It is just fear. Because I am about to do something new, something a little uncertain to me.

Just fear.

I kept breathing. It got easier to follow the in-breath and the out-breath, easier not to let my thoughts grab me, only to label them as thoughts and let them go.

Just fear. Just fear.

Then a memory. Hazelnut ice dropping on my skin, sun in the sky. My housemate next to me.

“You are hard on yourself,” she said.

Her voice gentle, while she offered me a tissue for the melting ice cream. Concern in her eyes.

Am I? Was I?

On the floor, cross-legged, I remember I am here to breathe. A touch of sadness, of heaviness, is there now. As if I have turned half stone, half mud, sinking into the earth.

So there is fear. Now there is sadness.

Let it go, let it flow, let it be. I say to myself.

Sadness for all the times I rushed. For speaking to myself in harsh tones. For letting the inner critic get the better of me. Never would I criticise any of my friends the way I do myself. There is a goal I have, I long for. And punishment in the form of accusations, of blame, of guilt, of shame, of damn Maria you are just not good enough, that stabs my heart.

Sadness for I know my housemate is right.

I have learned this harshness. It is not inherent to me. Of that much, I am sure.

A soft soul. Picked it up from the people around me, from family, from society, from always having to perform, from perfectionism plaguing us, and especially girls and women, for they will be asked more questions, be interrupted more often, and, when they try to build something of their own, rarely be given the money to do it.

Don’t make it so difficult, Maria, come on.

But there is my observation. There are the women in my family who I see suffering, and all I want is not to end like them. All I want. All I want, all I want—

Caught myself. I am thinking again. Spiralling. In sadness now. In helplessness.

Let it go, I think. Let the thought go, but acknowledge the feeling, for it is allowed to be there, to have a space in your world, in your being. And then, let the damn thought go.

My breath is still long. Undisturbed.

Fear and sadness. My companions of today.

Fear.

Fear.

Sadness.

I am not standing still.

Instead, space. Rest. I chose to get up a few minutes later. Wrap a soft scarf around my shoulders. Prepare a cup of hot tea, slice an apple with care. Open the door to my partner’s study. He beams at me. A kiss on the cheek, we hold our gazes for a while. I ask him, dinner in the city tonight? He says, yes.

Then I go back into my room, open my laptop. Write the messages to the new people, the contacts I was afraid of, I had avoided. Feel the fear in my belly while I hit send. Acknowledge the sadness of being restless.

And sit down to write this piece.

Now there is one more thing in the room with me. Anger.

Fear. Sadness. The making-myself-small, the always-being-available, the not-daring, the preparing for ages instead of bashing forward. I am angry. Take that, patriarchal capitalist world that wants me small and cute. And you, inner critic, wanting me to please and please and please and look so nice, be so good. I am done asking your permission.

I won’t be stopped pursuing my ideas, no matter how long it takes.

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