A deferred life

Living a deferred life is not living a life at all.  A deferred life is a life filled with fear, so you postpone, wait and procrastinate making decisions that will help you live up to your authentic potential.   

I’m intimately familiar with living a deferred life, in its depths I wrote:

- Fear, the more intangible and abstract is a superb motivator for more of the same kind of fear, to the depressed mind.

- Fear, a great excuse to be immobile, substantiated by the fact that it pins you to the ground

When you’re overwhelmed by fear it’s almost impossible to see that it’s not as bad as we think it is.  That it’s just our primal brain seeing a sabertooth tiger around every corner.  I have come to call my primal brain Matilda, she’s a bit of an old hag, and every now and again I have to lock her in her cage deep in the basement of my being, just so I can move forward with my life.     

Name your fear.  Write an ode to your fear, sometimes you have to do it many times a day, but do it to extricate yourself, do it to lay claim to your life.

To Matilda

Not so far beneath the surface

She lives her secret life

Wrapped tightly in a heavy cloak

She feeds on vile and strife

Stooped she walks the corridors

And watches for a sign

Of anything that might be joy

To ridicule and malign

“Not enough” she screeches in my head

“More” she asks of me

“My belly isn’t nearly full

Of your tears and misery”

Again and again she strikes my spirit

Pummels it black and blue

For one so old, so gnarled and brittle

Each blow feels marked and true

I drink each blow like mother’s milk

So eager to believe

That all the hate she hurls at me

Is just what I deserve

I am she, and she is me

So tightly intertwined

To kill one, would kill the other

We are both kin and kind

“Old hag,” I rage to spite myself

“Old hag, I’m done with you”

I hear her cackle long and low

“I love you dearly too”