I was five, maybe six. The crack in the cliff was about three feet across. The drop below it was twenty.
I jumped.
I didn’t know if I’d clear it. I jumped anyway. Because I wanted to belong, and the currency that I thought mattered was fearlessness. Flinching disqualified you.
That was one of my earliest lessons in fear. Not how to listen to it. How to override it.
And to be clear, the override worked. It got me across the cliff. It got me across a lot of cliffs. The version of me that learned to ignore the warning bells became very functional. Very competent. Very tired.
When you start practicing that young, the habit goes underground. You stop noticing you’re doing it. Fear arrives, and some older, faster part of you steps in and tamps it down before your conscious mind ever gets a vote.
There’s a book called The Body Keeps the Score. The premise is that unprocessed emotion doesn’t disappear. It gets stored.
Mine lives in my gut.
All the fear I stomped down. All the fear I told it’s irrational, get over it. All the fear I refused to sit with. Still here. Still waiting to be acknowledged and felt, so it can finally move through me and out.
Here’s the part I’m only now starting to understand. When I override fear without knowing I’m doing it, I’m not braver. I’m smaller. I’ve filtered information and marked it irrelevant before I’ve even let myself feel it, let alone be conscious of what it’s saying. I’m operating as a partial version of myself.
I want to get to know my fear. Especially the fear that doesn’t make sense to me. That fear has the most to teach me.
So I’m building an altar to it. A real, physical altar to my fear, in my home.
Because shame is wrapped around so much of my fear, and shame doesn’t want to be aired out. Shame wants to be tucked away, hidden, dissolved through avoidance. An altar does the opposite. An altar says: come sit here, where I can see you.
The point isn’t to start obeying every fear. The point is to transform what I feel toward it. From shame to reverence. A place to see what’s there. A place to learn what it knows. A place to build a visible relationship with the part of me I spent decades pretending wasn’t there.
It’s learning to treat my fear the same way I treat my anxious dog Einstein. When he barks at the door because he’s scared, I don’t yell at him. I don’t lock him in a closet. I pick him up. I hold him. I tell him he’s safe until he calms down.
Do that enough times, and something changes. His reactions soften. His ability to tell what’s actually dangerous from what isn’t gets better.
I think my fear is asking for the same thing.
Not to be obeyed. Not to be banished. Just to be held and heard.
P.S. If you’ve been the brave one for so long you can’t remember what fear feels like in your body, that’s some of the deepest work I do with clients. DM me if it’s calling.
