Part Six
Over a month has passed since my last entry into this piece. Honestly much of this paper had been pre-written as a near-complete whole. The only additions were minor adjustments and time specific asides vague enough I can barely glean my own past from their hints. Even now the rest of the draft is sitting in an untitled Google doc waiting for the next chunk to be primped and polished, waiting to be filed in as a seemingly coherent followup to the page before.
This time, I have to step away from the script.
Within the span of that month my life changed drastically. That phobia I spoke of? I approached its cliff, with the intent of sizing it up in preparation to paraglide off it, but instead slipped down the steep slope, almost failing to catch the ledge in a mad dash to not fall completely off, unprepared, unequipped, and most certainly unready.
The truth is my life was put at risk for something I didn’t fully believe in. I risked it for someone else, thinking that going over the cliff of the fear was the only way to handle that phobia. I was wrong. I was so so very wrong. That risk put me in need of life saving surgery, and I have yet to find something as telling of the gravitas of a situation as medical professionals rushing. Physically I’m well on the road to healed. Mentally, though? Thoughts and memories are unfortunately are harder to untangle when every moment feeds into the knotted ball of inner reality.
One should not just jump off a cliff or a bridge because someone else asked you to. No. No, no, no. This, this right here, this is why it matters whether something is a should or want. This is the breeding ground for regrets to follow the lemmings or to follow your heart. Only jump that fucker because you want to.
Fear is not a thing to be handled on anyone else’s schedule. Fear is the other driver of survival and if I should both fear and not want something? I still wonder how I survived.
I sit the closest to regretting something as I hope I ever will in my life. And all because I let someone convince me that it would be worth it. Worth all these emotions. Worth my life.
But the truth is I really don’t want to regret my choices, and that has meant waking up from the whispers of someone else’s life and listening to my fear’s panicked words rather than blindly letting it tug me down the wrong alley, because, I think we all forget, fear is also scared and thus incapable of thinking straight. No, this time I will listen. More specifically, I will listen to myself because, surprisingly, I want me happy.
The Quiet Mirror 
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