On another long overdue update

Hi friends.

Remember when I first started this very specific portion of my journey? I gave myself two hundred and twenty-four days to turn my life around. It is now day two hundred and eleven. That means I am thirteen days away from the end — less than two weeks.

When I first started, this day seemed very far away and impossible. I couldn’t even imagine it.

Apparently a lot can happen in just two hundred and twenty-four days, which is just about forty-two days longer than half a year.

When I look back, I see a lot of pain and confusion, but I also see a lot of resolve and determination. I see a woman at the threshold of her destiny, her footing uneasy but gradually becoming stronger.

I wish to speak emotionally and eloquently about the things that happened, but maybe this is a time when simplicity is all I need.

Did you know I have two birthdays? Well, I have one birthday and one re-birthday. My re-birthday was earlier this month, which I guess makes the New Me one year and some handful of days old. On that day — the day I decided would be my re-birthday — I said that I would no longer live in fear. Since then, it has been one fearful step at a time. To say there is no more fear now would be a lie, but there is certainly less.

Is love the ultimate act of fearlessness? I’d definitely put it up there. Fear can be very powerful and there are many things to legitimately fear. Fear is our most primal and successful tool of survival. It is how we stay alive.

But fear is also destructive, a heightened, unnatural state that cannot be sustained without damaging its vessel. Sustained fear changes who we are forever, especially when the fear begins when we are young, when we are supposed to be the most fearless. It gets in the way of love, which asks us to have no fear. If love and fear are not diametrically opposed, they are at least at twelve and five o’clock.

It is in a moment of my greatest fear that I found my greatest love. This story is intertwined with someone else’s, so I don’t think it’s my right to share all the details, but I would like to say that never before have I ever thought I might lose someone even as I held their hand.

They say that in response to fear, we flee or we fight. I didn’t run away, so I must have fought back. I still don’t understand exactly what happened except that I felt my heart suddenly burst open. That’s how it felt. It was like I was flooded with light and warmth and hope, so much that it poured out of me. Or maybe she was the one who was fighting in that moment of fear, having turned to run maybe, but then deciding to stand her ground. And her desire to stay and fight was so powerful that it drew me to her and tore me open.

Sometimes blessings truly are disguised. Everyone turned out somehow better.

Only a few days later, my newly opened heart would remember a part of itself that was once denigrated and shamed into hiding. Again, this story is deeply intertwined with someone else’s, and some of the secrets are too strange to explain, so I will share only what feels right. Please just know that some of us have a desire to give that runs deep in us like water in underground caves, unseen but powerful, and slowly shaping the earth. This desire can be easily taken advantage of or dismissed as weak, but please just know that we have counterparts who can touch the ground and feel us moving deep and secret far far beneath.

This desire would be drawn further into the light at the end of that month, and in the light, it would learn its radiant splendor and strength.

And then I had to make the decision that I would no longer let fear rule me, a decision that came very fearfully to me. When you have depended so profoundly on fear to survive, you never learn how to love. You learn scarcity, jealousy, rivalry, and insecurity. Parting with an identity — even a harmful one — is not a fearless act. Because who will we be if we are not ourselves? Because might we actually get to have the things we’ve yearned for? But that would mean we are worth it, and being worthwhile is not what we learned to be.

It didn’t come easily at first to say, “No, I am worth it.” I wish I could tell you there is a magic shortcut, but it honestly just takes diligent work. But so does everything in life.

It took work to get here, and I hope I never forget that. When I look back, I am full of pride and hope and peace. Hard work is not something I am afraid of, and my hard work usually pays off. These days I find myself surrounded with supportive and loving relationships — some of those relationships are new, and others are relationships that have deepened in the past year. I am finally free of the fear that used to prevent me from being able to hold and reflect all this love. It took hard work to stare down the fear and silence its voice, but my work has been rewarded with the capacity to embrace myself and everyone around me. The work was worth it.

In less than two weeks I will turn thirty-one. For once I am looking to the new year with excitement instead of fear. If this much happened in just two-hundred and twenty-four days, then I cannot imagine the abundance to befall me in the next year.

And I will be worth it.