Can you remember your first moment in life where you felt a deep, visceral fear? I do. I was a six-year-old in a church basement during a tornado watch. That's not true. It was a tornado warning. Sirens. Pounding. Darkness. Shuffling feet in the basement of a (very small) Victory Baptist Church. Quite honestly, I don't remember where my parents were. All I recall is the fear. My blood pressure. My beating heart. Shivering (hard) when it wasn't cold. I was going to die, for sure. I felt like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, staring face first into the mouth of a raging tornado. Fear is the underlining emotion that shaped my early, middle, and late childhood up until my early adulthood. Fear. Why so afraid? In recent months, I have been making an effort to find the source of this baseline fear. It could be the terrorism (literally) that occurred on September 11, 2001. That is one of my earliest memories. Strangely, I wasn't afraid. I was almost 4 when it happened, so it...
words from an adolescent heart