You are not the normal you project.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition,

with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God,

which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts

and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:6-7

Dear Me,

Your little girl heart is as knotted as your stomach. You roam around aimlessly in your mind while the other children play. Don’t they know their parents are late and most likely dead on the side of the road?

No, they don’t know that because that’s not the way they think.

For a long time, everyone else has been wrong, and you are the right one. On airplanes you manage the course and direction and altitude with your mind. You are the reason the plane doesn’t crash, which is the reason you never sleep on one.

If only everyone knew, then how much they’d thank you.

Your mother makes a practice of dying but never succeeds. Her body is an anomaly, a sick bed of everything wrong, but her outside is patient and accepting. Everything is there—your future walk with loneliness, the invisible ulcer that never stops growing, the way everyone else on the planet gets everything and you only get the whisper of what’s to come. You are as selfish as your mother lacks self.

You have a small dog, a toy poodle you love lavishly and treat like a divine entity. You hold her leash tight, your hand sweating as you walk around your neighborhood with your parents. Your dog gets close to the edge of the curb, too close to the street, and you lovingly yank her back to her rightful place. Your father laughs at your fear, says you’ve learned it from your mother, but how to let go of one more thing that will ultimately leave you too?

You don’t even think about this when you have a baby. You don’t even think about how babies replace all the bad in people’s lives although the bad is only patiently waiting, knuckles grazing the door. For a time, you can make everything right with your mind and good looks and canny ability to worry more about the clothes you wear than the heart wrapped up beneath them. And for a while, that bad is merely brushing bone and skin against the door of your soul. No bad, not here. Not today.

But then it surely comes, the anxiety a great big, massive thing that no longer scoots to its corner when you throw it a look. You are not the normal you project. You are very much “unnormal,” relying on the world to bat you around, eating all the worry that eventually returns the favor.

Peter, who you don’t know yet, asks the Lord to whom else would we go? Who else can he follow now that he knows the truth? Can you still hold onto that ever-present strain of fear when fear has been banished, its head under the boot? Can you serve two masters, you of the duplicitous heart and head full of doubt?

It’s a slow, long process, friend, of allowing God to rewire your mind and remove all the shackles—an act that is merely spectacle because the brunt of it was done and spoken for 2,000 years before.

He died for you, and He survived. So, what are you so afraid of?–

Talk soon,

Ericka