Last week, I wrote about dealing with fear. More specifically, the fear of more bad things happening. Of the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think it’s normal when you’ve experienced any major loss to begin to fear another one coming. So for the past six months or so, I’ve been having an increasingly big fear of someone else in my life dying or some other horrific thing happening.

Since writing last week’s post, I feel a little bit better about all of this. They’re still there… but it felt kind of like giving myself permission to have those feelings by sharing them aloud.

I think that’s the great thing about sharing our fears and struggles… it takes some of the heaviness out of it. It gives us permission to feel how we feel. I definitely felt a weight lifted off having shared those feelings out loud. And maybe even more importantly, it helped me to accept that I felt that way.

I think for a while now, I’ve been fighting all the fearful feelings. I’ve been avoiding them and trying hard to distract myself. Since sharing those feelings though, I’ve felt more able to accept those fears. It’s amazing how much more manageable they become when you allow them to be there and remind yourself that it’s totally okay sometimes to feel that way.

This past few weeks, and months really, have been a good reminder to me that it’s important to share the things we are struggling with. It helps us feel accepted, and find acceptance of our own. It’s not as if we can just erase the feelings that we struggle with, after all. So the next best thing I think is learning how to allow them to be there, and remembering it’s totally okay to feel scared, or sad, or overwhelmed. This past week, writing here helped me with that a lot.