I’m afraid but not even sure what of. It’s a big amorphous feeling. A force. The fear has been in my dreams:  In one, I was working at a bank in a non-descript white room at a desk that I’d had since childhood. I went out for a break and came back to find the desk gone – as was my job. Just like that. Gone. This is a fear tied to the local university’s announcement of a job freeze and to the news of Gourmet’s shuttering, a story that feels like a bell weather to me. In the next dream, I was suiting up to go downhill skiiing. I’ve never been downhill skiiing and am very afraid of heights. There was to be no instruction. They were just dropping me on the mountain – by helicopter – and leaving me there. Last night’s dreams were a bit gentler, but only just. I had 24-hours to outfit an empty house with appliances and furniture without any money — I had to do it by luck and charm — or I’d lose it. By the time I’d awakened, I’d managed to have a Viking stove come into my possession and the memory of Sylvia Plath had fleetingly occurred to me.

I made it a goal when Alex and I separated to eschew fear, to kick it out of my orbit and never to embrace it again. Fear has been such a constant bedfellow to me for years, prohibiting me from becoming my best self. And yet here it is. This gaseous dance of colors and sounds, a force field.

Last night in a scorching hot bath, I picked up Eat, Pray Love and opened it to a random section. Gilbert was remembering a trip she’d taken to a remote Balinese island a few years earlier – before deciding to leave her husband and light off around the globe. She’d sat on the beach and recognized each fear, each sorrow, each anger, and each shame from her life. (How she’d magically remembered them all, she doesn’t say — I have a habit of draping such memories in blackness so that they become hard to find later.) She acknowledged each one and then let it go. When she was finished, she felt cleansed and empty – void of the gaseous dance. But she knew that new shames and fears and angers would take their places. Again and again she would do this dance until she came to the point of, well, enlightenment. Until then, each of stays in the dance. All we can try for is a bit more grace.

So here I go: out into the world. Ready to dance with my fears. With that disappearing desk and the giant stove, with the mountain of sheer ice.