For two hours each morning, I write. I began reading about how to write a book between the cracks of life. Pod casts, blogs, and people generous enough to give advice about things I don’t know and they do. Pouring out my thoughts, my grief, my heart, my soul and dismantling my personality to figure out how I show up in the world, in the dynamics of characters around me, and the microcosms and archetypes within myself that created a life in shambles. And how the hell I was going to transform so that I could stop falling and finally reach rock bottom to feel solid ground again. And finally stand up.
Survival mode put me in a constant state of anxiety. And the only way I could soothe my panic was to keep searching for ways to crawl out of the life I was in. A sort of hyper vigilance that I have not yet been able to shut off. But the symptom of that constant prison was an activation of what might look like ambition to some. Because it built a stamina within me that unleashed energy that makes it difficult to stop working, stop analyzing, stop creating, stop figuring, fighting, and planning. Saying trauma makes us courageous is such a shallow depth of field. I know that now. Because it completely denies all that it has cost us. I am absolutely terrified of a life I have already lived through. And my nervous system refuses to go back. So my mind sees any opportunity to run from anything resembling it. Courage cannot exist without fear. Trauma births a constant state of discerning what to fear so that you never lose your freedom again. If you Understand that Fear is the root of my ambition then you will know that I am no more courageous than anyone else. Courage is just a symptom of those who are terrified.
If you have fallen deep enough, and have nothing to lose, maybe you can begin standing up too. And if you are able to stand, maybe you can have the strength to begin the climb. But if you’ve fallen deep enough, you know the climb is more difficult than the fall. You have an awareness of what you must overcome, which is of course, yourself.