The Betrayal

There is a strange betrayal that happens when life begins to go right.

You would think joy would announce itself like a brass band, or at least knock politely before entering. Instead, it slips in quietly, rearranges the furniture, opens a few long-stuck windows—and suddenly the mind panics. As if the nervous system, accustomed to weathering storms, no longer trusts the blue sky.

Lately, fear has been waking me in the night. Not the tidy kind with a single cause you can point to and say, Ah yes, there you are. This is the older fear. The one with no face, no name, only a heavy breath pressed against my chest. I wake damp with sweat, heart racing, convinced something terrible is crouched just beyond the edge of consciousness, waiting for me to look directly at it.

And yet—nothing is wrong.

In fact, much is right. Dreams I once whispered to myself like fragile secrets are beginning to stand upright. Doors are opening. The landscape ahead looks uncannily like the one I imagined all those years ago when hope felt like an act of rebellion. Life is not perfect, but it is generous. It is changing. It is growing.

So why the terror?

The mind, it turns out, is a creature of habit. It remembers patterns long after they’ve stopped being useful. If you’ve lived enough years bracing for disappointment, your body learns to flinch before the blow arrives—even when no blow is coming. Fear becomes muscle memory. Worry becomes a reflex, like gripping the steering wheel too tightly long after the road has straightened.

I ask myself in the dark:

Why can’t you breathe?

What are you afraid of now?

The answers are slippery. They drift backward in time. Old seasons. Old disappointments. The familiar story that says, Don’t relax. Don’t trust this. Everything falls apart eventually.

Perhaps that story once kept me alive. Perhaps it was useful when the world felt unpredictable, when safety was something to be earned rather than assumed. But like any survival strategy that overstays its welcome, it has become a thief—stealing moments that belong to the present.

During the day, I try to speak gently to myself, the way one might soothe a startled animal.

You are safe.

You are allowed to be seen.

You are allowed to take up space.

Nothing is chasing you.

It feels almost ridiculous, this need to reassure myself of something so obvious. But fear doesn’t respond to logic. It responds to repetition, to tone, to kindness. It loosens its grip not when it is argued with, but when it is met.

What if the fear isn’t warning me of danger, but of arrival?

There is a peculiar vulnerability in stepping fully into a life you’ve been cultivating for years. To arrive means you can no longer claim you’re just preparing, just practicing, just waiting. Arrival asks for presence. It asks you to stand where you are and say, Yes, this is mine.

And being found—truly found—can feel just as exposing as being hunted.

So I pause. I look around. I notice the evidence I usually rush past: love, steady and unremarkable in its devotion. People who know my voice. A life that keeps inviting me forward. The quiet miracle of breath moving in and out without instruction.

I am not alone.

I never have been.

Fear still visits. It probably always will. But it no longer gets to drive. I can acknowledge it the way one nods at a passing shadow—aware, but not compelled.

Take a step, I tell myself.

Just one.

I have got you, answers something deeper, steadier.

Always have.

And for the first time in a long while, I believe it.