If you had asked me three years ago what my greatest fear was, I would have said failure. 

Now I am deathly afraid of something else: a fire-breathing dragon that has the power to burn my life to the ground. By comparison, failure is just a monster in a closet.

But let me start at the beginning. If you have been reading my blog, you know that I am bipolar and that I have experienced a couple of manic breakdowns. If you have ever experienced a manic breakdown, you know what it is to fail, to literally break down inside and stop functioning.

Last year, I took a job in a mid-sized California city, along highway 395. It was my first true act of independence–living in my own apartment somewhere entirely new and working full-time. What could go wrong?

Well, enough. It only took a couple of months for isolation, anxiety, uncertainty, and a few well-placed poisonous people to splinter my sanity into tiny little pieces. My first attempt at being a full-fledged grown-up landed me in a mental hospital for 26 days.

Fail.

My family came to get me and bring me home to Arizona. I really can’t thank them enough. But it was not their support that drove me to then find a steady job, begin new relationships, and eventually find the courage to start a blog.

It was my new fear at work. The fear of getting STUCK.

There is only one failure that I care about now, and that is failing to move forward. As long as I continue to put one foot in front of the other, I’m making progress against the fire-breathing dragon of STUCK-NESS.

For example, this blog has one more post. It is not stuck yet!

–June Skye–