Today I went to the library looking for something about fear. Not because fear is a subject I was particularly interested in studying, but because lately I have been feeling it. Really feeling it. And when an emotion becomes this present in my life, my instinct is always the same: I want to understand it. I want to look at it from different angles, give it a name, find out what it is trying to tell me instead of simply wishing it would disappear.

And then I found this book: Courage by Debbie Ford. I picked it up almost because its title felt like the answer to the exact word I had walked into the library carrying with me. I was looking for fear and found courage instead.

I have always had a complicated relationship with the idea of being strong. Sometimes other people see strength in you because they see everything you have survived, everything you have managed, all the times you got back up and continued. But being seen as strong doesn’t mean you don’t get scared. It doesn’t mean there aren’t moments when something shakes you, when you feel vulnerable, when your body reacts before your mind has even had time to understand what is happening. Strength and fear are not opposites. I am beginning to think they can exist in exactly the same place.

Reading the first pages of this book made me think about how often we imagine courage as a personality trait, something certain people simply have. The fearless ones. The brave ones. The people who walk confidently towards whatever life puts in front of them. But perhaps courage has very little to do with being fearless. Perhaps courage only becomes necessary when fear is already there.

And maybe that is what I need to learn right now. Not how to eliminate fear, not how to pretend it isn’t there, and definitely not how to shame myself for feeling it. Maybe I need to learn how to make space for it without giving it control of my life. To listen to it without automatically obeying it. To understand when it is protecting me, when it belongs to something that has already happened, and when it is simply reminding me that I am human.

There is something strangely beautiful about going to a library searching for one word and leaving with its apparent opposite. I went looking for fear because that is what I have been feeling. I came home carrying a book called Courage. I haven’t read enough of it yet to know what I will find inside, and I certainly don’t have some perfect lesson to share at the end of this story. Maybe that is the point. This Artist Diary has never been about having all the answers. Sometimes it is simply about documenting the questions I am living through.

Today the question is this: what if courage isn’t the moment when fear disappears, but the moment when you decide that fear doesn’t get to choose what happens next?