I'm in Lesson 12 this week am so terribly frightened of change and moving forward in life (as you've probably been able to deduce from my recent posts!)

I did a search on the internet just for fun for agoraphobia, because I never knew that was what I was experiencing until I got the MWC program. Anyway, I came across this web site www.suite101.com and this article by Katherine E. Rabeneau called "Caterpillars and Butterflies." (I hope it's okay to copy some of it here...)

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly."--Richard Bach

"...The strange thing is that right in this moment I�m not afraid and for an agoraphobic that�s a huge thing. Those of us who struggle with agoraphobia spend almost all of our time worrying about what other people think, worrying about our mistakes (or often our perceived mistakes). We worry about what might happen if we go out the door and we worry about what may happen when we don�t. We seldom if ever forgive ourselves for our horrible imperfections, which range from how we look to how we think to the fact that we have not saved the world today to the fact that we are terrified of being out in the world and that aside from inconveniencing ourselves, that sometimes inconveniences others. Why did we not do better with our lives? How can we have come to this stupid, terrible pass in which we are virtually imprisoned in our homes, unable to work the way regular, �good� people do. So often we feel different; we feel like everyone is judging our strange view of life but the real judge, the judge who does us in, isn�t the people around us, it�s the cruel tyrant who lives inside our heads demanding that we be impossibly perfect, impossibly loveable. We feel misunderstood and abandoned by the world, but it is we who are the true abandoners of ourselves. We abandon ourselves to standards of perfection that no one could live up to. We tell ourselves that we don�t work hard enough, that we get sick too often and that we don�t recover quickly enough. When others are unkind, we don�t wonder about them. We ask ourselves �what�s wrong with me?� It never occurs to us that the answer might be �nothing.�

Maybe I have slipped off the edge of sanity or maybe, just maybe, something in me has healed at last. Of course I could have done things differently. I could be doing things differently now. There are difficult days ahead. But there are also awesome days ahead. I think I�m realizing that I�m neither good nor bad. I simply am. I am just me, Katherine. Sometimes I�m a pathetic fool and sometimes I�m actually wise. Sometimes I am brave and sometimes I just give in to my fears and hide because in those moments hiding is all I can do. I am human and to be human is to be flawed, - perfectly, pathetically, gloriously, painfully, magnificently, frustratingly, magically, tediously, creatively, wondrously awesomely flawed. To be human is to be perfectly imperfect.

I found a list recently of some people who have struggled like I do with panic and/or agoraphobia: Emily Dickenson, Abraham Lincoln, William Butler Yeats, John Steinbeck, Sigmund Freud, Nicholas Cage, Naomi Judd, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Carly Simon, James Garner, Charles Schultz and a host of others. That�s pretty good company. Maybe, just maybe, those of us who live with panic, who hide in our homes and beat ourselves up are still just in our caterpillar stage. Maybe at any moment we will realize our magnificence, pull free of our binding cocoons and float with light and radiant beauty, out into the world. We are like ugly ducklings who haven�t quite found our inner swan yet. But we will. I know it."

Gee, can anyone identify???