I accept fear as part of life, knowing that it means I am human.

Everybody in a hospital waiting room is doing the same thing behind different magazines. Nobody says so. Everybody is.

That's roughly the state of the species. Fear is standard equipment, older than language, installed long before any of the things we now aim it at — inboxes, mortgages, the silence after a text.

Accepting it isn't approval. It's declining a second argument, the one where you're frightened *and* annoyed with yourself for being frightened.

Drop the second and the first gets noticeably lighter. Being human is the diagnosis, and it isn't a condition anyone recovers from.