Poetry- "Bravery"

[Pan]

I've been doing a lot of work on my emotions and learning to accept and integrate each of them as part of my whole being. Often during art therapy part of acknowledging, understanding and accepting an emotion involves a, often cryptic, conversation with it. As such the process has a tendency to personify what you feel. It humanizes the parts of you that you have been taught to dehumanize. This is a poem about Fear as someone I walk this path with and love very dearly. 

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People will call you brave as though you have conquered something horrible.

A trial or tribulation which somehow marred the beautiful path you have walked since dawn.

They will praise you for it.

Clasp a hand on your shoulder, make toasts, congratulate you with grins and laughter.

All to commemorate the slaughter of your Fear.

"Victory!" They will shout as the Fear in you cringes and looks down in shame, resigned. 

They will make a monster out of you.

They will make a monster out of your fear and insist that its inevitable defeat is a sign of power and strength.

They will think and do these things, and you will look at your Fear and decide,

Whether the blood on your hands and Fear's broken body was truly a chivalrous deed.

They won't notice the abuse.

They won't see the scars or bruises on Fear's pale exhausted frame.

They won't see the way it shakes and trembles when you move too quickly,

Or when they turn their proud and admiring smile toward you again.

Instead they will just call you courageous.

And Fear will bleed out on the floor before you even realize that you just destroyed a part of yourself.

All because of other peoples notions and ideas about how "brave" you are.