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When I was seventeen and had just moved to university, I had such crippling emotions that my brain couldn’t fathom it could just be anxiety. It attached itself to everything, creating a very real fear of everything around me. Bordering on agoraphobic symptoms and the tendencies that come with that, I didn’t have the capacity to understand the constant sense of doom, of existing in fight-or-flight, or the terrifying nature of the world outside my flat. I barely left my flat, barely went to classes, met most new people when I was sitting on the steps outside my flat smoking and in university halls on the way back to my shitty little room. I feel bad for the people around me at that time, I felt too ashamed to say I was scared of everything. It manifested in small things. “Oh I’m sorry I missed your delivery, I was out”, (I’m too scared to answer the doorbell); “Oh I’m sorry I can’t come out tonight, I’m so tired”, (I’m too scared to walk from my flat to the bar); “Oh I’m sorry I can’t come through to Edinburgh”, (the shadows when I walk to the train station turn into things in the corner of my eyes). I remember being on the phone to my boyfriend at the time, crying that I wouldn’t be able to make it to see him and him asking me what I was so afraid of, what could possibly go wrong? Being asked outright made it harder because I couldn’t put into words what I was afraid of… that maybe what I was afraid of was both everything and nothing, but the fear inside of me was real… and then lurching into a place of more fear because grappling with the fact that your very real emotions aren’t based in a very real reality… that maybe it’s your mind making the fear, opening up a million more avenues for fear to come from. I had created a safe space so the idea that it was myself creating the unsafe space was too much to grapple with if I wanted to keep existing. That part of me is so far gone it makes me want to laugh when I think of it. It makes me want to grab that version of myself and shake her and say get a fucking grip the world outside the door isn’t scary!! But now when I think of fear I can’t help but think about the months of my life when I was terrified of everything.

Six years have passed and I live in a different country now, with flatmates who are strangers, and I’m not afraid of anything. Or, I’m afraid of a lot of things but they are tangible, real fears, like keeping myself and my friends safe when we go out at night, the state of global politics, the narrowing of world views and the rise of the hatred of otherness. I fear that women’s liberation was a blip in history and it’s coming to an end. I fear the end of my autonomy, I fear things I should be afraid of.  I fear more irrational things as well, sometimes the places my brain takes me to scare me, sometimes I still fear what I can do, the power I hold over others and they hold over me. I fear the passing of time, I fear the versions of myself that I don’t recognise anymore but only existed a few years ago. But fear doesn’t have any power over me anymore. I sit with it and talk to it, I reach out and grab it and learn with it. Sometimes I feel like I’ve gone to the opposite end of the spectrum. Maybe I should be more cautious, maybe I should let fear impact my decisions, maybe I’m more prone to risk or chance because of this, maybe I’ve broken my fight-or-flight instinct for life. But now I feel free. I love life, I love loving it, I love chances, I love trusting strangers. I love walking alone, I love taking myself to wherever I want to go, I love building lives for myself. I love the universe,  I love the earth, I love the trees and they love me.

I would never usually want to give context to a poem but this poem is called ‘Fear in Two Parts (I’m Terrified/ I’m Deluded)’.

I’M TERRIFIED

I fear the dark I fear the light

I fear the coming of the night

I fear what the shadows bring

I fear the doorbell when it rings

I fear the faces in the wall

I fear the noises in the hall

I fear the walk that I do every day

I fear the path that goes this way

I fear not knowing what is real

I fear not knowing how I feel

I fear the way the streets have changed

I fear that I’m fucking deranged

I fear the warping of my face

I fear being in this place

I fear everything that lies outside

I fear the world cracked open wide

I fear the things I see and hear

I fear how they are looming near

I fear the person I am not

I fear that this is all I’ve got

I fear the pounding bells of doom, that lie outside of my bedroom.

If what I fear is fear itself, is to live like this and nothing else.

I’M DELUDED

I fear nothing

I am above fear itself

I spread my arms and catch the sun

I spread my arms , they are the rays of sun

I am Helios, I carry the sun

I am godly, I am everlasting, the world is mine

I am the oyster, the germ, the planet Jupiter

There are a million me’s that live inside myself but not in synchrony

The me you knew is not the me I am

The me I am today is not the me I am tomorrow

I can do anything.

Life is like a bull, I catch it by the horns and ride it and then get tossed off and speared and splayed and in my death I see a figure walking out the dust and it’s me and we dance and then begin again.

Over and over with all the beauty in the world and the wind through the trees and all the grit of it.

Life is beautiful, you’ll see.

You are all powerful, you’ll see.