Be precise, now. Say what you mean
My earliest memory is fear. A funny story: We were at the zoo. I was three and couldn't read, so when I saw the empty alligator tank, I had no explanation.
I asked Mom. With the best of intentions, thinking only of how to explain off-exhibit zoo logistics to a toddler, she replied, "Oh, they let the alligators out!"
It didn't occur to her how that would sound until she said it. Until I screamed and bolted for the entrance, a door camouflaged by jungle wallpaper that in my panic I couldn't identify. Even though she picked me up and took me outside and reassured me that I misunderstood, the damage was done. I didn't set foot in the reptile house for another five years.
But she wasn't trying to scare me.
She was never trying to scare me.
If you have faith in the Lord, you have nothing to fear,
None of the demons of magic or evil or Pokémon could touch you.
Problem: I was too thoughtful. I had too many questions. I had an active imagination that whispered thoughts that would damn my soul.
What if God wasn't real?
I believed in Santa Claus until I was twelve years old, when my parents stopped signing gifts "from Santa." They assumed I already knew. Everyone assumes that a twelve-year-old with a high reading level and the best grades in her class would have long since realized that Santa couldn't possibly be real.
It's not that I didn't have doubts.
I just loved the magic of it, and I wanted it to be real. Every other kind of magic was evil and off-limits.
Reign in your thoughts. Do not let imagination become an idol.
Solution: I developed a talent. Denying myself the power of critical thinking. Constructing an echo chamber so airtight that no one could shake the crumbling foundations of my faith.
I touched something, back then, or something touched me. It told me in a hundred little lessons that magic was real, and it was good, and it rooted me to the earth and the sky and the trees and my home.
I couldn't listen, then.
But I'm not afraid, anymore.