The question I ask myself every day.

I want to introduce you to a question. It’s the question that runs through the memoir I’m writing. It’s the question I ask myself when I’m deciding something I’m not sure about. It’s the question I would have handed to my seventeen year old self if I could go back — not as a warning, but as a compass.

Am I choosing love or fear?

It sounds simple. It isn’t.

Fear is an extraordinary impersonator. It can sound like practicality. It can sound like loyalty. It can sound like ‘I don’t want to make things worse’ or ‘maybe I’m overreacting’ or ‘this is just how it is.’ Fear is very good at wearing the costume of a reasonable decision.

Love — real love, not the love bombing version, not the conditional version — is quieter. It doesn’t usually make the louder argument. It doesn’t threaten or guilt or catastrophize. It tends to show up in the body before it shows up as a thought. A sense of ease. The ability to breathe. The feeling of being allowed to take up space.

For most of my twenties, I was making decisions from fear and calling it love. Not because I was foolish. Because I had been taught, through years of ordinary experience, that fear was the rational response and love was something you earned by making yourself small enough.

The work — and there’s no shortcut here — is learning to tell them apart.

So I want to ask you something, and I’d love it if you’d sit with it for a minute before moving on:

Is there a decision in your life right now — big or small — that you’re making from fear? And if you made it from love instead, what would change?

You don’t have to answer to me. But you might want to answer to yourself.

I’ll be here next Tuesday.

With love, always.

Bek