One of my favourite quotes, that lives rent free in my head, is the following by Georgia O’Keeffe:

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”

For many years, this felt like both an inspiration and an aspiration to me. A concept that I wanted to wear, to place over my skin, and walk through the world with its message becoming porous into my own, very much terrified, flesh.

I mean, I got the fear bit. But the doing the things I truly wanted to do?! Nah! Not so much.

Cut to today.

Right now, I’m wearing this skin. No, actually it is the skin I’m walking though life with. I’m raw, exposed, and oh so goddamn open to life itself.

If fear was my familiar, along with shame as it’s wingman, then they held the reigns to my own sovereignty. They made the choices of and for my life without consulting me first. They made me their bitch, whilst having me sign upon the dotted line with my sleeping corpse fingers, cold and blue, unliving, half-dead, sleepwalking on my bruised knees through the pathways that defined the shape and texture of who I was in the world. According to them that is.

I was fear’s puppet. It pulled my strings.

I was a goddamn Pinocchio, made of petrified wood for my bones.

So basically, what I’m saying is, I was a muppet, with fear’s hand stuck up my ass! How very unbecoming for a lady!

What does being brave mean to you?

Do you think of heroes and pioneers? Do you think of those folks who put themselves in danger for a cause that they can only see? Do you count yourself amongst their number?

I’ve watched many of my friends being brave. Over and over again. Moving countries for a life that fell away to reveal something else. Doing 180-degree turns toward a future that only an inkling nudged them toward. Saying yes to that which has no guarantee. Walking away. Walking toward. Staying still.

I’ve no safety net these days. Not in the ways that fear has demanded.

Now that I think about it, this “net” has been more akin to a cage. Limiting. Constricted. So that I’ve had to crouch and bend and contort into shapes that deemed unsuitable for a queen. For one who owns the queendom she rules over. That of her life. My life.

The old safety net wants the guarantee. Written in blood. Signed by God and several of his closest angel advisors. Or whatever bullsh*ttery happens “up there!” The old safety has sought the confines of the walls outside of me. Needing to feel the solidity in order to know that if they’re there then I must exist, even if I couldn’t feel my own physicality.

Of course, by assigning safety to “out there,” the unfortunate yet obvious unpredictability and change that is a constant in a world that is living, only meant that fear and terror were always keeping guard. Just in case. These walls might crack, crumble, fall away, fall down, be gone within a moment. Just one puff from the Big Bad Wolf and it would all come tumbling down.

That’s a hell of a lot of wall surveillance for a woman who isn’t particularly interested in the field of builders and construction.

Being brave is an inside job. It’s the reflection that holds the key. The way out. The way through. A new way.

It’s the finger pointing to the moon and the trickster that dances upon our reality, stomping it into the delusion of illusion, which it always was.

The way to brave isn’t in the safety out there but in the safety within. And there’s no way in hell we can ever have this if there’s no one home. Ding dong. Avon calling. Or should that be adventure calling?! Are you going to answer the door babes?!

What if terror was a holy offering? An initiation into the new. Into life. I mean, can anyone remember how terrifying it must have been being born? To be pushed through the birth canal and out into this seriously f*cked up world? All lights, camera, action. Horrifying, right?!

Hmmmmm. I know that I was a forceps baby. Pulled out. Was I frozen into wood even before it all began? Bless my wee self.

Maybe terror has always been my tour de (non) force in the world.

Being brave right now is in taking off the faux safety harness and seeing whether I can fly. I might be able to. Or I might not. But how will I know if I don’t try?

So much of this harness has already fallen away this year. This year I called my year of adventure as I toasted it in on a balcony in Malaga, before waking up to 2024 with a dream about Nick Cave to welcome the new year in! I mean, hello life! And thank you!

I think we have to let the harness fall away if we’re to become light enough to fly.

I’m flying right now, and some days it’s a pure joy to soar with this fire fuelling my heart, trust as the parachute that’s buoying my flight, and the expansive horizon open so vast from way up high and here. And on other days, terror is the turbulence that shakes my every bone, making my hand to seek the abort rope to abandon this mission. This quest. But then I remember my year of adventure and I soften my grip. Ride it out baby, I think to myself. Even if it’s helluva uncomfortable. It will pass. Tomorrow will be different. And so, it is.

If terror is simply turbulence, unpleasant, but not a place to live at, a final destination (ahem, for all those fans of said movie!) then all that is bigger than that is life. Is bravery. Is risk and dare and the Superman-ing our way toward being our own hero.

I am brave and terrified right now. And it’s a holy moly ride into freedom!

Aho X

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