Since my late teens, I’ve lived with an anxiety disorder that –– let’s use house guests as a metaphor –– spans from the in for a night, sleeping on the couch, you’ll barely know I’m here sort to the kind that comes for a week and stays for two years. After a while, you start to discern which one you’re making the bed up for. I’ve done a fine job of minimizing my anxiety disorder to the outside world –– that was how I learned to deal with it –– to the point that very few people know that I have one. All those years of minimizing it has cost me vital years of an alternate solution; accepting it. There is a day, as the wisest of owls, Anaïs Nin said, when the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk to blossom, and when that day comes, we have no choice but to be honest. Honesty is scary, and surprisingly freeing. It helps to try it out on people whom you trust, who’ve been honest with you, too. One honest conversations begets another. And so begins a chain reaction to something so liberating you wonder why it took you so long to blossom. The house guests still come, they likely always will. My hope is that they don’t stay quite as long. Guests, like fish, start to smell after three days.