For a time I was incredibly disconnected from my emotional world. For some of the more logical people out there, I’d say, my ability to think and act rationally, while compartmentalizing my experiences, hindered my ability to appreciate what I was truly feeling in any moment.

I was going to say, “I don’t often experience fear,” in response to my friend Tracy talking about her experience of recognizing her own...

But that would be a lie.

I don’t often experience fear as a sort of dread that is going to consume me. I don’t consciously notice fear always, because it takes the shape of the scattering of focus. While it can live in my body as orbs of unsteadiness floating in front of my heart or a sinking in the gut or an energetic shock that runs cold through my nervous system… it’s rarely one of those sensations.

Most frequently?

Fear is distraction from my sense of purpose. Fear is the moment I look over my shoulder when I should just be running my race. Fear is the moment where I choose money over love, because I’ve stopped trusting the universe to keep feeding me as I try to pass the torch of passion to as many people as possible. Fear is the moment where I consciously stop saying “I love you,” because I’m worried that your feelings have changed. Maybe it seems like I’m trying to control you. Maybe it feels like I’m being taken for granted. Those moments are fear. They are not simply measured action. They are the lived rationalizations of the experiences within me. It seems we are endlessly trying to make wordy sense of our sense of the world.