The theme for TILDE CARNIVAL this month brought me back in touch with FEAR, an old friend.

FEAR has played a disproportionate role in my life when considered against the other Primal Emotions. I never seem to run out of space to consider FEAR and how it has shaped me and continues to impose itself on me. But that is such a slippery slope. And I'm not particularly interested in giving FEAR more airtime on its terms--so why not on my terms?

We have this beautiful and unique ability to dress up our lizard-brain emotions and play them back as caricatures, inverting an ancient power dynamic and becoming showrunners and storytellers, presenting our FEAR instead of being driven by it.

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Mom once divulged--reluctantly--the truth of why she never closed her closet door, something that concerned my ten-year-old self greatly, as the deeper darkness of the closet interior gave focus to my ever-present FEAR.

Laying awake in bed some night in what I sincerely hoped was her distant past, Mom felt something in the room with her. Not the kind of urgent, paralyzing sensation of someone hovering over her in the darkness, but that pit in her stomach that we've surely all felt at one time or another, which told her something was off and danger was neigh.

The feeling drew Mom's eyes across the room, and they settled on that deeper darkness of the closet. She knew, somehow, that something was there that she could not see. Most concerning, she was certain that it wanted her looking at it.

Hours-long seconds passed, then suddenly an eerie green glow filled a space in front of Mom's hanging clothes. The glow revealed a figure: a man dressed in old mining gear stood facing Mom's bed, eyes fixed on her own frozen look of terror.

Mom was also no stranger to FEAR and had an astounding resilience. You could say she was a "survivor" (she had certainly survived her share of horrors). Even young ~qq was not surprised when Mom told them that despite the FEAR, she got up and flipped the bedroom light switch, turning on the lights.

The glowing figure was gone. But there was no sense of relief. She again felt that something was wrong even before she realized what it was. The hanging clothes in the closet still held the impression of someone standing against them, someone who was never fully there and who had never fully gone.