The Day I Realized Fear Has Been Living My Life For Me

Day 15 — December 8, 2025

Mondays.
Bah. Mondays.

Fear lived loudly in my mind today. Not in the “hide in the closet with Roger and pray for reincarnation” way (mercifully), but in the awareness way. The reflective way. The kind of fear that doesn’t scream. It just stares back at you, waiting for acknowledgment.

I kept thinking about the hold it has taken on me.
Not a gentle hold, a chokehold.

A grip with its own agenda, one I never asked for and never consented to.

Fear turned my life into a place I didn’t recognize for a long time. It dictated my choices.
It rewired my instincts. It hollowed out my sense of safety until even breathing felt borrowed.

It broke me. Completely.

And for a while, I truly thought it had killed something permanent inside me — something I’d never get back.

Two weeks ago today, I reported what happened. Two weeks of waiting for justice to begin.
Two weeks living in a more intense and terrifying state of fear than anything I’ve survived before — and that’s saying something. Two weeks of knowing the authorities are “doing something” and yet having no idea what. Two weeks of waking up with adrenaline in my bloodstream like it’s drinking my coffee before I get the chance to.

My fear is real.
My fear is valid.
My fear is everyday.

This man owns properties.
He assaulted me at one I viewed.
He coerced me into returning.
Then months later he showed up at my apartment, the one he had no business being at, lying about needing in my apartment, looking for access, threatening me again.

Of course I’m afraid.
Of course I’ve been barely surviving.
Of course my nervous system has been screaming for a year.

And here’s the part I’ve never said out loud:

For an entire year, I lived as fear’s bitch. And I’m done with that now.

Today, I sat at my kitchen table as the sun set right outside my window. The window I once looked out of with excitement about my new home. My first home on my own, as myself. A place meant to be safe, warm, sacred, mine.

Instead, fear moved in before I even finished unpacking.

Looking at that sunset tonight — those ridiculous pinks and reds and purples painting the sky like the world was trying to apologize — I felt something pull at me. A quiet sadness for everything I’ve missed because I’ve been too busy surviving my own life to actually live in it.

But also a reminder.
One small, surprising reminder:

A single beautiful moment can change everything.

And maybe, just maybe, this is my moment.

Not a cinematic breakthrough.
Not the end of fear.
But the beginning of something shifting.
The beginning of a woman stepping back into her own body after a year of hiding inside the shadows of it.

Today was a lot.
Today was heavy.
Today was honest.

And somehow —
today was also a beginning.

Chaos in one hand.
Grace in the other.
And a sunset reminding me that I’m not done becoming.