rackers co

I don’t know how transcendent an experience you can have at 10:30pm on a Saturday night, tucked up in bed with your head stuck in a book. I don’t know how real this experience of mine was, or if it’s the pure exhaustion my soul is currently feeling at play. I don’t know if it’s the unfamiliarity of the room I am sitting in as I housesit, listening to god awful music playing from a house near here when I am used to dead silence (or the run of rats feet on my ceiling). I don’t know.

But I am sitting here, and I am reading; is it important what I am reading? Perhaps it is, perhaps the book is what made it happen. For a little ambiguity, though, I’ll leave that out.

I had this moment. I have always been oddly calm living where I live. On the many nights being alone, when every member of my family is partaking in a social life and I am happily sitting at home, I have never once thought something bad would happen. Friends would disagree; our house scares them, there’s lots of windows and they’ve seen too many horror movies — our house is a movie directors dream. I’ve always felt more scared sleeping in a house in town, near neighbours, but closer for people to get to you.

So I heard weird sounds, and I looked up from my book and looked straight into the mirror. I stared at the face I know so well, my own; and this familiar face stared back at me but I got shivers down my spine. A voice (mine, no doubt) popped into my head, and said “this is what you are afraid of.”

An out of body experience internalised. An inner body experience, if you will.

The face I know so well was simultaneously my most comforting thing to look at, and the thing that scared me the most. The fear I feel for everything; life, love, death, lack of success and finding no purpose in life. It all circles back to one thing. The thing staring at me in the mirror.

While this is one of the most profound moments of my life, I’m sure many of you are just thinking — “girl, you’ve had a big couple of days. Have a good night sleep and you’ll stop being so weird in the morning.”

But jokes on them, I don’t ever stop being weird.

Everything you are afraid of in life circles back to a little part of you. Stops you from running free, from ending it with that toxic, shitty person, from starting your business or writing your thoughts or moving away from home; from doing what the very heart of you wants to do. Your ego. And while I stared at my face, at the accidental-toomuchtoner-purpled hair, and the very face I have come to love; I felt my ego try to knock me out of place. It doesn’t want to be caught out. It doesn’t want you to realise that your fears are your own manifestation. But they are.

This could purely be the exhaustion speaking. But the exhaustion is right. I am afraid of never being good enough; that does not come from the potential murderer, the flight that goes wrong, the faulty car, nor the actual act of being rejected. I am afraid of never being good enough because my ego tells me I am never going to be good enough; as it feeds off insecurities, doubts and self-hatred.

Everything I could ever be afraid of is staring at me in the mirror. And the only thing to fix it is the very same.