My Greatest Fears: A Poem
There are times when my mind turns into something like a ball of rubber bands, or your Christmas lights if you don’t carefully wrap them for the season. My racing thoughts often turn to anxiety, and I start catastrophizing. I have some strange fears, ones that have stayed with me over the years. In this poem I bare some of the more personal ones.
Tonight I am
pushing out of my head the absurd thoughts
some of them fears
deep-seated anxieties knit within my core
stitched and absorbed, assimilated
into the very atoms within my being,
based on personal histories.
They emerge suddenly
unbidden
amid my other mess of thoughts
not unlike a tangle of rubber bands
or a tiered merry-go-round spinning off kilter.
Answering the door half dressed,
irreparably muddling an attempt at something new,
wandering out of the house oblivious and nude,
spontaneous vomiting in public,
having to raise someone else’s child
and hear the baby scream in the night.
Opening my eyes and seeing only darkness,
my performance of a standard physical movement
resulting in awkward embarrassing clumsiness,
becoming truly hopelessly lost,
having that one bad brain day from which
I never return,
sending me spiraling perpetually
into my own madness.
Julie “Soaring Eagle” Paschold
