Elizabeth Gilbert suggested writing a letter "From Fear"

I did your suggested exercise of allowing my fear to write a letter to me, and thought the insight might be worth sharing in case anyone else relates:

Dearest Lizzie-Lynn,

I hate you. You will be the death of us all! Maybe.

But admittedly, you get things right sometimes and then I don’t hate you so much. And honestly, you get things right more often than I'd like to admit. You seem to prove me wrong often enough, but that doesn’t give you the right to ignore me. I’m trying to protect us, you know, and you keep telling me to shut up. I’m tired of it. I want you to listen. To really listen to me. Get curious and ask me questions about why I’m saying what I’m saying so that we can figure out a solution together. There’s usually a solution, but you seem to just give up if I mention a concern. Please stop that.

I think the reason you do that is because sometimes you give WAY too much meaning to what I tell you. Sometimes I tell you "I don't know what will happen!" and you think I said, "the world's doom is upon us." All I'm asking is that you listen to what I tell you and we arm ourselves with the info, so we can plan our next moves together! And please remember, I DO mean to alert you, but not IMMOBILIZE you. I simply want you to LOOK at the things I bring to your attention. Sometimes I say something because I'm SUPER sure we've both been here before, and it was really painful, so I’m just trying to say "Let's not do that again!” which in my mind means we can figure out together how to proceed, but you often default to giving up on your idea.

And lastly, I think you're braver than I am, which honestly is scary because I think I'm right most of the time and in spite of my opinion, you put us into unnecessarily precarious situations when you ignore me. The painful results could be avoided if you'd just LOOK at what I'm trying to point out to you.

I simply want you to be aware of and then decide what you'll do about the topics I bring up. I'm sure you can figure out ways of keeping us all safe. You're pretty creative, you'll figure something out... As long as you actually LISTEN to me and stop IGNORING me, that is.

With hate sometimes, and love sometimes,

Your Ever-present Fear

Elizabeth Gilbert suggested writing a letter... This is the link to that post.