The Other Side of Fear

Written a few days ago -- but I still feel relieved!
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Relief. It is a strange feeling. It is not one I have ever had the chance to evaluate at length, but I have been feeling, and thinking about, that particular emotion very much today. Today I received some news that I have been waiting for, but fearing would not come, since the end of June last year. To all the dear friends and family who have provided comfort since that time, this is my announcement that the best - as you told me it would! - rather than the worst has at last happened. In the first minutes after getting that news, I felt sheer joy - the kind of joy that leaves you shaking, and crying, and feeling as if you could take on anything in the world. But since then this joy has settled into something quieter, but no less marvellous. Relief.

Relief, I realise now, is the other side of fear. It is what you feel when reality has been turned on its head for a time, but then rights itself. And the longer reality has been the wrong way up, the more reconciled you had got to the prospect that you might not wake up from the nightmare - the purer, the deeper, and the more, well, odd the feeling of relief is. It's like having a huge bruise, that hurts when you touch it, but then suddenly one day, though you can still see the bruise turning from purple to green, it doesn't hurt no mutter how hard you press at it. Throughout today, I have kept pressing away at the bruise I had got so used to, but there is no pain there any more. Just relief, and the promise, at last, of a future in a world the right way up.

It is hard to become unaccustomed to fear. Relieved as I am, I cannot help but think - surely this is temporary? Maybe there has been a mistake, and I'm just looking through a maze of mirrors, which make the world look the right way round, but in reality it is still topsy-turvy? But no. The relief, which is just beginning to work on healing the wounds of fear, says otherwise. It is real. The only thing to fear now is fear itself.

Relief, the release from fear, is not a steady emotion. It is like a calm ocean. It has no crashing waves, but it swells every now and then, filling your heart and splashing its salty liquid into your eyes.

Quite simply, I am relieved. And, humble, overlooked, and undramatic though that emotion may be, it is one of the best things I have felt since the end of June last year.