Recently, I have been processing fears brought about by my return to work within the public education system created from my experiences in a school I was working at just before I moved to the Middle East.

4 years later, back in Canada and the system – but at a different school, I am shocked at how powerful these returned fears are.  A conversation with a co-worker empathized with me, saying my concerns and fears sound like symptoms of PTSD as she too worked at a school that traumatized her.

That would make sense, as I am all too familiar with PTSD, having had a history with it and was actually seeing a therapist before my move to Qatar who diagnosed with me PTSD, not ADHD – but that is another discussion.

I was scared to step back into my old job, but was so excited to be back with the children again.  It was when the excitement wore off as routine settled in, that the volume of my fears escalated and I became hyper-vigilant.  It was the empathy of a coworker who also experienced on-the-job conditions as I once did, that grounded me to see.

What puzzles me is my inability to identify, to “see” exactly why I am feeling fear.  I may have an idea why.  But it gets all mixed up with other imagined fears. I am mindful every day about myself, trying to grow.  But fear is the messiest emotion I feel. I feel fear every single day – about something – and all of these fears are imagined – without proof – but thrive on the mindset “it happened once, it will happen again”  as proof it will happen again.  My main imagined fear is about people, thinking that they will hurt me.

I am reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tole.  He speaks of fear happening when we are focused on the mind, not within our body and in the Now.

When I am in my mind, I sweat all the small stuff to create imagined bigger stuff.

When I’m in my mind, I can’t let go.

I think back to all my blogs I’ve written about my fears and wonder if I will ever truly be free of it?

I think back to my blog series about turning 50 and feeling a freedom, an earned permission not to give a fuck (not have fear) anymore, ever, if others like me, or what they might think about me.

But here I am, five months into 50 years old…and sometimes I feel ahead of the fear while other times, I’m right back in it.

I’ve started giving a horse, Portia, Reiki.  Yesterday after work, I stopped by the barn to give her a small treatment. When I step inside the barn or walk out to the pasture to help my friend Liz bring her horses back to the barn….life becomes that moment. In the quiet of the barn, as the other horses watch with curiosity and Portia adjusts to Reiki, life feels the way life is suppose to be – heart-centered and easy.  I feel like Joyful Stephanie again…..

• 

• 

Then, when I arrive home and my husband asks me not to judge his first batch of baked Keto muffins, laughter spills out from my very soul and I belly laugh as I love to do!

As my mother and my husband tell me, everything is going to be okay…

Just for today, I will not worry.

S, ❤️