You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt quoted by Laura Drake in The Sweet Spot (p. 168)

Stop to look fear in the face.
Don’t run from it, don’t bury your head,
don’t medicate it with food, booze, drugs,
anything obsessive, anything mind-numbing.
A fearless and searching moral inventory.
That’s the biggest fear, the morass inside,
the resentments we’ve nourished for years
before the sneaky instructions in the Big Book
make you look further, at how you feel,
where you’re goaded, just what the fear is…
then how you caused it or goaded it on.
An evil and corroding thread;
the fabric of our existence shot through with it.
And when you’ve faced the fear, somehow,
always, it’s deflated, diminished.
The fearsome lion begins to resemble
a pussycat.