I was afraid of my own mind before I even knew how it worked. High school halls and people’s doubts echoed with my hesitations: What if what you write betrays you? I knew I was meant to tell stories before I could even spell the words “meant to.” But the knowledge curdled when I tried to hold it too close.
In classrooms where honor students were royalty, I was the quiet kid in the corner, face hidden behind a book. Average, at best. Sometimes worse. My math grades sagged like branches under too much rain. But poetry was mine. At least, I thought it was. But one day I won a Filipino Month poem contest, and the teachers’ surprise felt louder than the applause. Their smiles seemed to ask, You? As if my words had trespassed into a space they didn’t belong. I laughed it off at the time, but those raised eyebrows stayed with me. I remebered. Long after the medal was forgotten, their doubt curled into my chest like a blooming fist.
As a child, I thought being an author meant plucking constellations from the night sky, weaving them into something warm, something fuzzy as Dorrie’s black cat Gink. As a teenager, I realized that weaving often cuts. That fear is the loom and the thread.
I feared what I might find when I pried myself open. The chance that I might unearth an ocean and drown. Or worse: that the well was dry, the bucket empty. I feared the creation as much as I feared its absence.
There were nights I felt dangerous, like I could split the world with a single sentence. And mornings I couldn’t move my pen: the crushing possibility that my voice might crack in the silence.
So I built a room where my creativity could breathe. A space bordered by tender rituals—a candle, a song, the sound of rain hitting leaves. Small sanctuaries for a frightened writer to kneel, to murmur her first confessions.
Fear lives at the core of every stilled hand, every unopened notebook. It’s the ghost that hovers over us, whispering later, later. But fear is also a door. And the key is gentleness.
Let us meet ourselves softly, take fear by the hand, and teach it to move with us, not against us. Let us write not despite fear but because of it. A slow exhalation, a bridge into the heart’s unknown terrain.
The blank page waits, not as an enemy, but as an ally. Its silence is a promise: you are enough. Let’s create safety here and move forward, line by careful line, word by trembling word.
