It was a sunny summer’s day and I was lazing around at home, as all 15-year-olds are won’t to do. The doorbell rang, and I begrudgingly stood up to answer it. On our doorstep stood a man in a white polo barong, asking if my parents were home. They’re at work, I say to him. He hesitated, but decided to hand me a letter. It was a summons, I think, or some kind of court order. You have three days to leave your home, he said. We were being foreclosed.

I don’t remember much after that. It was a confusing next few days. I just remember feeling scared and confused. My mom was at work and my dad was on a business trip. I remember crying. I remember my mom crying. I remember boxes, my mom’s best friend helping us pack, the sound of the packaging tape ripping, more confusion, trucks, and then finally an empty house.

I do remember the last day we spent there. We were sitting on the floor, on a broken Dance Dance Revolution mat, eating some food, a bottle of coke. I remember joking about that awful man coming back to our house and playing DDR on our mat. I remember my dad coming home to a house that echoed because of the emptiness. I remember it was the first time I ever saw him cry.

I think that was the last time I ever felt safe.

You know how when people say “nothing is impossible”, they often mean it in an inspirational context? This time of my life is when my mind flipped the script on that saying. Truly, nothing was impossible, and that meant anything terrible that you can imagine can (and probably will) happen. The rug can be pulled out from under you at any moment. You’ll inevitably find yourself on the ground, seeing a different perspective, with a sore butt and an aching back. You’re not safe from the dark things. No one is.

So as I grew older I developed a defense mechanism that I felt would keep me as safe as possible: imagine all the terrible, horrible things and prepare for the worst fate. Never sit with your back to the door. Always survey the room as you enter it. Don’t trust anyone and always hold something back so that they can’t fully hurt you. Stuff your bag with emergency items. Have a small flashlight in your purse. Walk with your keys in between your fingers so you can stab an attacker’s eyes with it. Always lock your car doors the moment you enter. Check the backseat. Never let them get you to a second location. Scream.

I didn’t realize, up until very recently, how this hypervigilance has dictated how I lived my life. How training my mind to find the worst in everything (and everybody) has affected my decisions and my relationships. Sure, it made me a fantastic problem-solver, but I was also an amazing problem-seeker. Emergency situations didn’t faze me, but that’s because my mind was always in an emergency. I didn’t realize that 15-year-old Kris was still at the wheel, which is absolutely the worst idea because that girl doesn’t even know how to drive. I thought this obsessive desire to imagine every possible horrible outcome was helping me prepare for anything. Instead, it just made my mind a dark place to live in, and my life one that was driven by fear. My mind was always everywhere else except the present, living in spaces and timeframes where the worst has already happened.

Doing or not doing things out of fear holds us back from so many opportunities, or puts us in places we’re not meant to be in. I’m re-evaluating my life now and I can pinpoint the moments and relationships that were built in fear, and they are not beautiful. Thankfully, our God is a good God and he makes all things work for the good of those who love Him, and that’s why I am here today and I have what I have. My heart may have been driven by fear but my spirit was being led by Someone who didn’t want me to drive myself into a pit of quicksand. (For those interested, you can get out of quicksand by slowly leaning backwards and lifting your legs up, distributing the weight, and by doing slow back and forth motions to help release the hold of quicksand. Thankfully, I’ve never had to test this in real life but I figured, eh, good to know.)

I am so thankful for the people in my life who never gave up on my surely exasperating paranoia. My husband, my parents, my friends, leaders in church. I’m thankful that the last few years have been spent unshackling myself from all of these restraints I put myself in. It’s been years of inner healing, of uprooting and unlearning, and just when I feel like I’ve got it all figured out, a new revelation comes up. We truly are constant works in progress.

I’ve also been working closely with Yen Uy, who is a transformative coach who specializes in helping people get out of their own way. She has been helping me ask myself the right questions – and this particular discovery was because of our most recent conversation. It’s been incredibly mind-blowing how much we don’t really know about ourselves until we decide to lift up the dusty covers. It is exhausting, but fulfilling work.

I guess I’m at the starting point of another unlearning journey. I need to figure out how to enjoy things things just for the sake of enjoying, without having to prepare for every single negative outcome. I need to learn to be spontaneous (even if it’s scheduled spontaneity because look, I need a schedule okay!!!) and to live with just a compass and no map. To work with little information and allow my spirit to be led by the Holy Spirit into the places I am supposed to be in, without letting fear be my guide. To remember that I can really only find safety in the One who can never be touched by death, because He already conquered it.