Fear is loud.
It screams at you. It colours everything around you. It takes a moment of uncertainty and turns it into something enormous. Something permanent.
And when you’re standing in the middle of it, sometimes you can’t see anything else.
I know that feeling intimately.
When my Multiple Sclerosis transitioned into secondary progressive MS, my body was deteriorating at a frightening pace.
I was receiving regular steroid infusions. My symptoms seemed completely out of control. Everything I’d known about my life was changing, and there was very little I could do to stop it.
And I’d tried.
I’d stopped abusing my body. Cleaned up my routines. Changed how I lived, how I slept, how I approached my health.
I was doing everything I believed I was supposed to do.
And none of it stopped the decline.
That’s a particularly frightening thing to discover when you’ve spent your life believing you could change your circumstances through effort and determination.
What happens when effort isn’t enough?
I remember feeling as though somebody was slowly carving pieces away from me.
Not one enormous blow.
A little here. A little there.
Until I barely recognized what remained.
There’s a scene in my graphic memoir where I’m sitting on the porch watching my daughters playing outside.
They’re little girls, enjoying their lives.
And I’m sitting there wondering how the hell I’m going to have one.
How am I going to exist?
How am I going to be their father?
What are the next forty or fifty years supposed to look like?
I wasn’t simply frightened of becoming disabled.
I was frightened of losing myself.
And when I think back to that period, what strikes me is how permanent everything felt.
It was a forever moment.
I couldn’t imagine being anywhere other than where I was.
But I wasn’t there forever.
Not because my MS disappeared. It didn’t.
Not because I suddenly discovered some tremendous inner strength or became a fearless warrior battling disease.
That’s not my story.
The rebuilding happened in small moments.
Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.
Finding something I could still do. Discovering something I could participate in. Learning to live with something I’d lost.
There were setbacks. Despair. Anger. Plenty of mornings when I questioned whether I was up to the challenge.
There still are.
I couldn’t rebuild the body I’d lost.
But somewhere along the way, I began rebuilding the person living inside it.
And I didn’t fully recognize that was happening until much later.
Which brings me to last week.
I was working on my website, trying to fix the formatting in a paragraph box.
Sounds simple enough.
Except my right hand was curled up and barely cooperating. My brain was exhausted. I couldn’t figure out why the bloody layout wouldn’t work.
The more I tried, the more frustrated I became.
Until it wasn’t about a paragraph box anymore.
Suddenly, I was questioning the entire project.
Had I taken on something I couldn’t handle?
Was this whole idea of writing essays, building a website, putting my work into the world just another thing my body wasn’t going to let me do?
Was I setting myself up for failure?
I walked into the bathroom, stood against the wall, and rested my head there.
Just letting the frustration and anger wash over me.
And underneath it all was fear.
That familiar fucking fear.
A problem with a paragraph box had somehow become a judgment on my entire future.
Eventually, I started talking myself through it.
Stop it, buddy.
Breathe.
Come back. Sit down.
One little step at a time.
And that’s what I did.
I eventually figured out the problem. Finished the website. Now I have a place where my work lives, something I’m proud of and can share with people.
But sometimes I won’t figure it out.
Sometimes I’ll do everything I can and the problem will still be there.
MS has certainly taught me that.
What I’ve learned is that fear can tell me something is wrong without necessarily telling me the truth about what comes next.
I was reminded of this recently while teaching one of my daughters to drive.
We were travelling along a narrow subdivision road, cars parked on both sides, with another vehicle approaching us.
She was getting overwhelmed.
I could see her starting to freeze, holding her breath, trying to process everything happening around her.
So I told her to stop.
Pull over. Put your indicator on.
Let the other car pass.
Breathe.
Now, check your mirrors. Think about what you’re going to do. Make a little plan.
And when you’re ready, let’s go.
And she did.
She kept moving.
What struck me afterward was that I was teaching my daughter something I’d spent years trying to teach myself.
You don’t have to solve everything that’s frightening you all at once.
Sometimes you need to stop long enough to see what’s actually in front of you.
Don’t look at the whole room.
Look at the corners.
There’s something else about that moment I can’t ignore.
Years ago, I sat on a porch watching that little girl play, terrified that I wouldn’t be able to be the father she needed.
And here I was, years later, sitting beside her, helping her navigate her own fears.
I couldn’t have imagined that moment back then.
I couldn’t imagine much of anything beyond the life I thought I was losing.
And yet, here we are.
None of this means I’ve conquered fear.
I still worry about my health, my family’s future, and what the next MRI might reveal.
I still have moments when my body lets me down and I wonder how much more I’ll be able to manage.
Those fears are real. And sometimes they overwhelm me.
But I’ve come to understand that a frightening moment isn’t necessarily the entirety of my life.
Some things get better.
Some things get worse.
Some things never come back.
And somewhere among all of it, there’s still a life happening.
Fear doesn’t get to be the only thing happening simply because it’s the loudest.
I don’t always remember that when I’m standing with my head against the bathroom wall.
Sometimes I still have to tell myself to stop, breathe, and take one little step.
I haven’t learned to defeat fear.
I’m learning to stop believing everything it tells me.