The energy has changed, can you feel it? The fear weakens, its power diminishes. Its muscles atrophy rapidly from disuse, its grip loosens around my neck. I can breathe, and all I had to do was relax.
The specter of failure that I used to frighten myself into inaction was always an illusion, a self-made prison built for circular reasons. Fear feeds and devours itself, an uroboros of senseless suffering. Fear is the anticipation of pain, or of destruction, or of unhappiness. Fear’s growth and and its stranglehold on your soul rely on the lie that all pain is avoidable if you just stay within the box. Stand within the lines, do not venture into danger, then you will not experience pain. You will be safe.
There is no safety, there is only holding back. There is only inaction that will lead to the worst pain: regret over a life not lived. And the more you give in to the fear, the more you obey its dictates and stay within its boundaries, the more fearful you become of breaking free into danger. You forget what it was like to breathe. You forget that you are anti-fragile and that pain makes you stronger, that mistakes are required for learning, and that the only lesson you cannot learn from is inaction because all you can learn from that was that you should have done something, and that you wasted time you will never get back.
The mind must relax its grip on the body, allow it to breathe. You are not so breakable. Fear will always whisper to you, but you can train yourself not to listen.