Fear was the first God I met.
It lived in bottles and weekends,
in walls that shook with shouting,
in two drunken adults
and two kids hiding under the bed
counting the gaps between blows,
seeing the red blood run across the floor.
Fear taught me hunger.
Hunger taught me theft.
A stolen tin of peaches
was my first scripture:
no one is coming.
If you don’t move, you don’t eat.
Fear was the air.
The law.
The grey film over every colour
whispering:
stay small,
stay silent,
stay still.
But something in me
refused the script.
A spark.
A counter‑instinct.
A forward‑leaning pulse that said:
move.
Act.
Step.
Now.
I learned early
fear is a liar.
It shouts like a tyrant,
but when you walk into it
it folds like smoke.
Ask the bodgies in Shepparton.
Ask the biggest bloke in town
who watched an 18‑year‑old kid
with shaking knees
step into his shadow
and call him out.
The crowd held its breath.
He backed away.
The whole line dissolved.
That wasn’t bravery.
That was refusal ....
to let an old God rule me.
Fear is ancient.
Older than language,
older than fire.
A leftover *****
from a world of predators and dark.
It still thinks we live in caves.
It still thinks the unknown will **** us.
It still thinks silence is safety.
But the cave is gone.
And some of us
have started outgrowing the *****
Positivity is not cheerfulness.
It is the weapon you forge
when no one is coming to save you.
The muscle built
from a thousand small rebellions
against the ancestral stop sign.
Fear contracts.
Positivity widens the field.
Fear freezes.
Positivity moves.
Fear guards the threshold.
Positivity walks through
as if the guard were dust.
I have lived eighty‑one years
with fear at my shoulder
and the engines in my chest.
One whispers: stop.
The other says: go.
Every time,
I choose the engine,
Of positivity.
[email protected]
14 April 2026