I thought I'd healed that

A forecast of fear

A few days ago, I walked by one of those little free libraries near my house. I wasn’t expecting much, but a book cover caught my eye, one with this eerie cloudscape. And instantly, I was 15 again, staring up at the strange-colored sky in a recurring nightmare I haven’t had in over a decade.

In the dream, clouds rolled in like a slow-moving apocalypse. The color of them was… wrong. A color I’ve never seen in waking life. Wherever their shadow fell, people melted. Literally. Their bodies dissolved onto the pavement. Friends. Family. Strangers. I always just barely escaped, running to this red modern building with mirrored windows and doors.

I’d hide in the corner of an empty office with no doors and use a huge windowed view to watch the world melt and change through not knowing how to stop it. The dream always ended with a lineup like a school photo, but some of the people were half-melted. Skin peeling back to reveal skull. Others stood untouched. I was one of the ones still intact. That was supposed to be comforting, I think.

It wasn’t.

Back then, I didn’t know what to do with feelings like that. I didn’t have the language or the tools. I had creative input like books, isolation, and so many emotions, but no place to put them. Not really. Not until I found writing. That’s when things shifted. My high school creative writing teacher handed me a pen and, without meaning to, gave me a lifeline.

For me, poetry became permission. It was a way to sit with chaos and not be consumed by it. A way to take fear and make something, anything, from it. That dream felt like a metaphor for helplessness. For emotional flooding. For what it feels like when the world is unraveling and there’s nowhere to land.

Which… sounds a lot like now, doesn’t it?

Lately, I’ve been noticing how the emotional climate mirrors that dream. The world feels unhinged. A kind of internal and external unraveling of injustice and violence. And even with all my tools… journaling, spiritual practice, years of therapy, I still get hit with waves of overwhelm. Through all of those years, I have learned something essential though: just because I feel it doesn’t mean I have to build a story around it. Not all feelings need narratives (or even an immediate reaction). Some just need tea and time to flow through.

One of my meditation teachers once shared a visualization I come back to often. Picture your body like a lighthouse. Each feeling that arrives comes to the door, and you decide whether to let it in. Sometimes you open the door, offer it a seat at the table, and serve it tea. You name it. You acknowledge it. You thank it for the visit. And sometimes, just by doing that, it leaves.

That practice has taught me something: most of the time, it’s not necessarily about the feelings that hurt, it’s the act of resistance to them. The avoidance. The rejection. We as humans are SO SO good at denial. We’re well practiced. That rejection and denial is what sticks.

It sticks to the caves of your subconscious, in the deep cockles of your body, to bits of our souls.

Learning to let the feelings visit has been a lifesaver, and a pain in the ass. Especially the ones that feel old and like I’ve already been and done this before. The ones that feel like throwbacks to my 15-year-old self, who didn’t know what to do with all that weight.

As I stare at this book cover, I know that if we don’t learn how to process fear, it’ll show up in places that are dangerous for us and others not to mention (dare I say) damn inconvenient. Fear sneaks around us like some cartoon ninja thief, popping up when it’s time to step forward or stand up. Or while having a doom stroll with the dog to clear your head, and finding a book that reminds you that we may very well be in the beginning stages of some apocalypse. Suddenly, everything looks like a horror movie montage we forgot we dreamt about.

Thanks to my creative writing teacher for my writing. I would certainly not be here without this channel for the heavy stuff (and the joy too).

I don’t have a clean ending for this. I know that the people who’ve found creative channels for their emotions—poetry, music, dance, storytelling—often end up being the ones who can keep feeling without drowning in it. And for me, that’s the goal. Not to escape it. Not to solve it. Just to stay human in the middle of it.

For now, that’s enough. Keep showing up human. I suppose I can do that.

Love yo face!
MJ