i am afraid.

confession on the eve of the eclipse.

i am stuck inside the starting gate.
afraid to begin.
i am 57.

i am afraid i don’t know how to become the old woman i want to be.
a woman functioning like a compass that actually points north.
not spinning. not second-guessing.

i am afraid of being seen in my complexity.
not curated. not edited. with nowhere to hide.

i am afraid of feeling my own voice shake (realizing it’s mine)
saying out loud the large parts of me that are still silent.

i am afraid of building something real and watching it fail in public.

i am afraid of leaving a life that works on paper but constricts in my chest.

when i imagine staying exactly where i am for three more years, my body panics.

when i imagine beginning slowly, deliberately… my chest loosens.

i am afraid to stop clutching stability and begin expanding into life.

i am afraid because i don’t want to prove anything anymore.

i want to live a life i don’t need to escape.

that feels dangerous.

i have performed so much.
scrolling back through the years, i see quotes about courage, bravery, warrior energy.

half of me was silent.
half of me swallowed words to stay loved.

church taught me to be a good girl.
perform.
smile.
don’t question.
swallow the parts of me that didn’t fit.
know my place.

the volume of words i swallowed still lives in my throat.

i am afraid i will keep preaching matriarchy when i hunger to live it.

i am afraid of who i am if i am not regulating everyone else.

i am afraid i will keep swallowing and die choking on my own silence.

we’ve been fed the lie that old age is rocking chairs, loneliness, invisibility.

it is not.
there is fire here.
there is hunger here.

i’ve been homesick for myself.
cut off from some essential part of me.
hungry for the deepest thing in me.

i am afraid of the light at the end of this tunnel.
i can see it.
liberty bell ringing.
i am afraid i am home.
can you be afraid of being home?

i am afraid to let my interior voice cross the threshold without “i’m sorry.”

failure threatens my identity.
but staying where i am threatens my life force.
that is the truer fear.

i am not as afraid of dying as i used to be.
i am more afraid of not living fully alive.

the less afraid i am of dying,
the less willing i am to live half-alive.

tomorrow is a new year. new fire.

tonight is confession.

on the eve of this eclipse
i, tiffini,
lay down the story i was born under.

i have excavated the wound.
studied it.
named it.
traced it across the sky.
let it explain me.

it has had enough airtime.

what happened to me happened.
the hard.
the harm.
the years i swallowed myself.
the silence.

i am not minimizing it.

i am done centering it.

tonight i leave the wound in the past tense.

i carry the good.
the strength.
the discernment.
the weathered wisdom.
the parts of me that refused to die.

i am no longer a woman orbiting her injury.
i am a woman stepping onto new ground.

what i write from now on will have me at the center of my own story.

not as martyr, aftermath or explanation.
but origin.

tomorrow the fire runs.
tonight we shed.

i am afraid.

and i am going anyway.
slowly. deliberately. humanly.

blessings on our couraging
-tiff