When Facing Fear Feels Like Walking Up and Down the Mall Escalators for Eternity

It's April 11, 2026, but it might as well be April 11, 2025, or April 11, 2024, or April 11, 2004, for that matter. 

What I mean is, I feel like for the last twenty-or-so-odd-years, my life hasn't changed much. 

Sure, I've grown older. My husband and kids have too. I've moved--a few times, actually--although the home we're in now is the longest I've ever lived anywhere in my life (and believe me, I'm getting antsy as hell).

I've changed jobs, yet I can't quite seem to ever change my career as a teacher. For some reason, I always return... and always regret it.

 Life has brought some highs: victories lived through my children, health battles that didn't take me out of the game, a continued marriage, despite hard times.  

My biggest victory of the last decade, no doubt was finally embracing my beliefs about God's Universal Grace to All Creation, including Mankind. Huge win in a religious world damned determined to make the Creator of the Universe into a monster of their own making.

But who am I kidding? Life has also brought some lows. Some low-lows. I've lost hella people over the last fifteen years of life, but especially since 2020. I've felt completely defeated by marriage, parenting, and business failures. I've struggled to regain my joy after entering menopause and all that comes with aging. 

And honestly? I'm restless. Plain bored. 

I'm anxious about what's going on in the world around me. 

One might say I'm over "it." Whatever it is.

I've created blog after blog after blog. Seriously, I can't tell you how many blogs I've created, crafted, curated... then shut down. I've written post after post after post. Poured my heart out. Really took the time to think about what I was saying. Typed it all out... then deleted. Opened business after business, all eager and excited at the start. Thought I'd researched and was ready. Busted out the Opening Day signs to great fanfare... then closed shop with my tail tucked between my legs. 

I stand at the tops of cliffs always ready to jump! And always breaking into a million pieces of shame at the bottom. 

Like Paul of the New Testament, "I don't know why I do what I do."

I want to write. I love everything about it. I love stories and their meanings. I love people, even--especially--fictional characters. 

I want to travel the Deep South. I love to explore. I love history. I love getting lost in new places and seeing how other people live. 

I want to create beauty. I want to encourage others. I want to speak my mind freely and be who I really am. 

And I want to do all of these things without fear, but I can't! For some reason still unknown to me, I simply can't. 

Maybe I'm embarrassed? I don't want people to judge me. Nobody does. It hurts to lay yourself bare and have people criticize a part of you. 

Maybe I'm afraid of being known and exposed? I've seen people's lives picked apart when they gained a following. It looks horrific. 

Maybe I'm pessimistic? I've endured too much failure to succeed. I'm not one of "those" people with all the connections and the clout and the candy-colored clouds floating above me. 

Maybe I'm all of the above and then some. Yes, probably. Definitely. 

For the first ten years of my life although I endured a couple of moments too big for me to understand, life was relatively peaceful. 

Around nine or ten, it changed and fell apart. For the next decade, the grown-ups made decisions that affected me, a byproduct, decisions I neither asked for nor wanted. 

As a result, I made reactive decisions myself. Decisions I did ask for and did want--but as a means of getting the hell outta dodge. I wasn't thinking, I wasn't planning, I wasn't dealing cards from a deck that held my best interest. My fast-moving destructive train barreled into innocent (and not-so-innocent) stations. 

That's life. Our actions never occur in a vacuum. They indeed affect others, whether we want them to or not.

I think somewhere along the way--probably long before I realized what was happening--I began to think that I needed to atone for my actions, prove my worth, and survive at all costs. 

Life has become an endless act of stepping onto the up escalator (battles, struggles, events that don't help but hurt), then riding the down escalator (numbing, distracting, letting life happen to me instead of choosing), and doing this over and over again, wringing my hands and crying out in frustration because I don't know how to get off the escalator-from-hell for good. 

But this week, with the death of yet another uncle in less than a year, my 46th birthday creeping up faster than I'd like, and a host of other familial, financial, spiritual and physical realities slapping me in the face, I've upped my commitment to figuring out just how the hell to jump off this thing. 

If I have to fly over the edge, run like hell in the other direction the minute I'm at the proverbial top, or just fall flat on my face at the bottom, too tired to step on the up escalator, I'll do it to not live the same year again. 

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.