SCARED

This began as one of my inky pages with water dropped onto it.  I drew the "tear" or crack across it, with me peeping out at the world, and wrote in big letters "I'm scared".  As you know, a lot of my pages begin with a single word or phrase like this ...

To appreciate where I'm coming from with this, the thing you need to know about me is that I tend to do this "good old Rosie" act, pin a big smile on my face, get everyone organised and be the one who cheers everyone else up.  My sister once told me (ages ago before I got ill) that I could be very scary in my extreme competence, and I gaped at her in amazement and said "but its all an act, I'm always frightened inside".  That's still true, although I'd rather hoped that when I got to be a grown-up (when does that start exactly?) I'd grow more confident with maturity.  Well I have in a way ... but my inner child is still in there and she's frightened of all sorts of things!  I suppose what I have learned is that most of our worst fears aren't realised anyway, and yet we waste so much precious time and energy worrying ourselves sick with our imaginings.  It seems to me that I'm more able to say "well I'll deal with that when, and if, it happens".

As you can see, most of my fears are just the normal stuff that haunts all of us - loneliness, bad things happening to people we love, and so on, but all of us have our really SECRET fears that we can't (or daren't) tell anyone about.  I'm certainly not writing mine down here!  These are the ones that come out in anxiety dreams, and tend to be at heart about being exposed for the fraud you really are .... yeah you know the ones.

I was trying to record these feelings in the hope that, by naming them, they'd lose some of their power?  It does work like that at one level.  So I also wrote about being brave, and what that means to me - I'm a member of the brave girls club, and I work very hard at being courageous.  Its that "feel the fear and do it anyway" thing I suppose.  I am a bit of a fighter for a cause too, but perhaps less so in my own defence, although I'll bravely stand up for other people, particularly against injustice.

I guess what I'm really trying to ask is ... how come a 58 year old grandmother like me can still feel such a lost child sometimes?  Still trying to conquer my fears, putting a "brave" face on, still doing my well-known impersonation of a confident woman who knows what she is doing.  Will I ever really become the Brave Girl I long to be, or is bravery really and finally about still being scared but not letting it hold you back?