I_m Scared Right Now... I Have Terrible News For You _ Sheikh Hamdan _ Fazza Poems _ Fazza

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I need you to stay calm, please. Before you read another word, before your mind starts racing to the worst possible place, just breathe. Just stay with me because I know what that title did to you. I know the moment you saw those words, terrible news, something in your chest tightened. Something went cold, and I am so sorry for that. I am so sorry that the first thing I did today was frighten you, but I need you to understand why I said it that way. I need you to understand that the fear you felt in that first second, that sudden, sharp, involuntary fear, that reaction tells you something important about yourself. And I am going to spend every word of this helping you understand what that something is. So, please, don't go anywhere. The terrible news is coming. I promise I will tell you everything, but first, I need you to stay right here with me in this moment, breathing, present, because what I am about to say to you is the kind of thing that deserves your full attention and your stillness and your open heart. Are you still here? Good. Don't move. The terrible news is this, and I mean this with everything I have, with every honest bone in me, with the full weight of someone who has thought about nothing else for longer than he wants to admit.

[00:01:18]The terrible news, the thing I am scared to tell you, the thing that has been keeping me up, the thing I have been rehearsing and postponing and building up the courage for is that I think you have been living your life without fully understanding how extraordinary you are.

[00:01:36]And I don't know how to carry that knowledge anymore without telling you. I don't know how to keep watching you move through your days carrying yourself the way you do, being everything you are, and stay silent about what I see.

[00:01:51]That is the terrible news, that you might not know, that you might have gone another day, another week, another year without someone sitting down and saying it to you plainly and without any agenda except the truth. I told you it was terrible. I told you I was scared. I am scared because the truth is a vulnerable thing to give someone. I am scared because saying what I actually see when I look at you, all of it, without the careful editing, without keeping the most intense parts at a safe distance, means standing somewhere completely exposed. It means you can see me, too.

[00:02:30]And that is terrifying in the specific way that only the most important things are terrifying. Not the small fears, the large ones. The ones that live in the chest rather than the mind. The ones that have something real at stake. But I am more scared of the alternative. I am more scared of staying quiet, of letting another day go by where you don't hear this, of choosing my own comfort over your need to know what you are because you need to know. I am more convinced of that than I am convinced of almost anything. You need to hear this, and you need to hear it from someone who means it, someone who is not saying it to get something from you or to make a moment or to fill a space with pretty words, someone who has looked at you, really looked with full attention and full honesty and arrived at these things not because they are nice to say, but because they are simply, undeniably true. So, that is what this is. That is why I am here today with my heart doing what hearts do when they are about to say something that matters, with my hands not quite steady and my voice not quite even and everything in me pointed toward you like a compass that finally found its north. I want to tell you what I see when I look at you.

[00:03:53]Not the surface, not the easy things, the deep things, the things that require having paid real attention over real time, the things that don't reveal themselves to people who are only half present or who look without truly seeing. I have been paying attention. I have been seeing. And what I have found is something that I think you have been systematically undervaluing, possibly for most of your life, possibly because the people around you were not equipped to show you its true worth. And that, that chronic undervaluing of something this precious, is the most terrible news I know. You have been treating yourself like you are ordinary, and you are so profoundly, so specifically, so completely not ordinary that it almost breaks my heart. I want you to think back, not to the highlights, not to the moments that were obviously significant, the achievements, the milestones, the things you are allowed to be proud of publicly. I want you to think back to the quiet moments, the ones nobody else saw. The morning you woke up and everything felt impossible and you got up anyway. The time someone said something that could have destroyed your confidence entirely and you felt the hit of it, really felt it, and then slowly, without fanfare or witness, rebuilt yourself from it. The moment you chose to be kind when being unkind would have been easier. The moment you told the truth when the lie was right there, comfortable and available and consequence-free. The moments you were good when nobody was watching, when nobody would have known the difference.

[00:05:34]>> [snorts] >> I know about those moments, not the specifics, but the shape of them because I know the shape of you, and the shape of you is someone who has been doing the quiet, invisible, unglamorous work of being a genuinely good person in a world that doesn't always reward that, in a world that often doesn't even notice it.

[00:05:56]You have been doing that work anyway, without the reward, without the recognition, just because it is who you are, just because somewhere in you there is a compass that points toward right, and you follow it even when following it costs you something. Do you understand how rare that is? Do you have any idea how many people lose that compass or trade it in for something more convenient or let the world slowly talk them out of it over time? And you have kept yours through everything you have been through, and I know it has not been easy. I know there have been things that tried to take that compass from you. You have kept it. It still works. You still follow it, and that is not a small thing. That is one of the most important things I know about you. I want to talk about your heart because your heart is something I think about a great deal and something I want to make sure you understand the value of. Your heart is not careful. That is the first thing. It is not the kind of heart that keeps one eye on the exit. It is not the kind of love with a portion of itself while keeping the rest safely protected, safely distant, safely unavailable for loss. Your heart goes all the way. When you love something, a person, a dream, an idea, a moment, you love it completely. You bring everything. You hold nothing in reserve. And I know the world has looked at that quality in you and called it naivety, called it too much, called it something to be protected from rather than celebrated. I know there have been people who saw your open heart and thought it was a vulnerability to be managed rather than a gift to be honored. Those people were wrong. They were so profoundly wrong that I feel something close to anger when I think about it. Your open heart is not your weakness. It is your greatest strength. It is the thing that makes you capable of love that most people can only approximate. It is the thing that makes the people lucky enough to be loved by you feel more seen and more held and more real than they have felt anywhere else. Your open heart is a gift that you carry into every room you enter and offer to the people in it, and most of them don't even know how to be grateful for it because they have never encountered something so genuine before.

[00:08:23]I am grateful for it. I want you to know that. I am grateful for your open heart in the specific, personal way of someone who has been on the receiving end of it and understood immediately what a rare and precious thing was being offered. I have not taken it for granted. I will not take it for granted, and I want to spend as long as you will let me making sure that your open heart feels safe, that it feels like the right choice, that it never regrets staying open in a world that gave it so many reasons to close. Because here is the thing I am most scared of. Here is the terrible news underneath the terrible news. The thing that has been keeping me up at night and sitting heavy in my chest and filling the quiet hours with a particular kind of ache. I am scared that the world has been slowly, incrementally teaching you to close, that every disappointment, every person who didn't handle you carefully, every moment where your openness was met with carelessness or indifference or deliberate cruelty. I am scared that each of those moments laid a brick, built a wall, inch by inch, and hurt by hurt, constructed something between you and the world that was not there before, something protective and understandable and completely heartbreaking.

[00:09:47]Because if that wall exists, if somewhere in you there is a version of yourself that has learned to hold back, to wait, to offer less than everything because offering everything has led to pain. I want to be the person who sits with you on your side of it. Not demanding you take it down. Not pretending it shouldn't exist or that the reasons for it weren't real and valid and earned. Just sitting with you, being present on your side of whatever you have built to protect yourself.

[00:10:18]Being someone who is not in a hurry.

[00:10:20]Being someone who understands that trust is built slowly and that real things take the time they take and that you are worth every bit of that time and more. I want you to know something else.

[00:10:34]Something I have been moving towards saying since the beginning of all of this. Something that sits at the very center of everything I feel and everything I want you to understand about why I am here saying all of this on this particular day.

[00:10:51]I am not scared of you. I know that might seem like a strange thing to say, but I mean it in a very specific way. I am not scared of your depth. I am not scared of your complexity. I am not scared of the parts of you that are still healing or still figuring themselves out or still carrying things that haven't found their resolution yet.

[00:11:12]I am not scared of the version of you that exists at the end of a hard day when the strength is spent and what's left is just the raw, unpolished, completely real you. That version, the real one, underneath everything, is the one I am most interested in. The one I am moving toward. The one I want to sit across from in the quiet and know, really know, with the patience and the presence and the full attention that it deserves because you deserve to be known like that. Fully, without conditions, without an expiration date on someone's patience, without the quiet anxiety of wondering when the person across from you is going to decide that the real you is too complicated, too much, too hard to hold.

[00:11:57]You deserve someone who looks at the complicated and the much and the hard and says, "Yes. This This is exactly what I came for. I am that person. I want to be that person for you." And I know that is a large thing to say and a larger thing to prove and I am not asking you to simply take my word for it. I am asking for the chance, the time, the slow, patient, un-rushed opportunity to show you rather than just tell you. To be consistent in the way that actually means something.

[00:12:30]Not the consistency of grand gestures, but the quiet, daily, un-glamorous consistency of someone who shows up, who stays, who means what he says. Not just on the days when meaning it is easy, but on every ordinary day when the real character of a person reveals itself. I want to show you that kind of consistency. I want to earn the kind of trust that only that consistency can build. And I want to do it without pressure, without timeline, without any agenda except the genuine, simple, enormous one of making sure that you you specifically, with all of your depth and your open heart and your quiet, extraordinary strength, know that you are not alone in this world. That someone sees you. That someone is paying attention. That someone thinks the most important news he could possibly deliver on any given is the news of how completely and how truly and how without any reservation he sees her. And I want to stay in that sentence for a moment.

[00:13:36]I want to let it exist in the air between us without rushing past it because it is the truest thing I have said today and today has been full of true things.

[00:13:48]I see you. Not the curated version. Not the strong version. Not the version that has everything together and knows what to say and moves through the world with confidence and grace. All of those versions are real and all of those versions are beautiful.

[00:14:05]But the one I mean right now is the quieter one.

[00:14:09]The one that exists in the private hours. The one that sits with uncertainty and still chooses to keep going. The one that loves deeply even after love has been costly.

[00:14:21]That one. I see that one most clearly of all. And what I see there is someone who deserves every good thing that life is capable of delivering. I want to keep talking to you. I want to keep building this this conversation, this honesty, this particular closeness that has grown between us today through the simple and radical act of saying true things to each other without flinching.

[00:14:45]Because something has happened today that I don't want to lose. Something has opened between us that feels fragile in the way that new and real things are always fragile.

[00:14:55]Not because they are weak, but because they are unarmored. Because they haven't had time yet to grow the protective layer that comes with age and repetition. This thing between us is new and unarmored and I want to handle it with the care that deserves. So I am going to keep going. I am going to keep giving you what is true. Not because I don't know when to stop, but because stopping feels like a betrayal of everything today has been and I am not willing to betray this day. I am not willing to betray you. I want to talk about loneliness. I know that might feel like a sudden turn, a strange direction to move in from where we just were. But stay with me because I think loneliness is something you understand. I think it is something you have lived with in the particular, quiet way that people live with things they don't talk about because they have learned that talking about them makes other people uncomfortable. I think you know the specific loneliness of being in a room full of people and feeling unseen. The loneliness of being known partially. Of people knowing your name, knowing your face, knowing the surface facts of your life, but not knowing the interior of you. Not knowing what you think about in the quiet. Not knowing what you reach for when you are struggling. Not knowing the full, complicated, beautiful truth of who you actually are underneath everything you present. That loneliness is the cruelest kind because it is invisible. Because from the outside everything looks fine. You are not alone. You have people. You are present and participating in your own life. But inside there is this quiet ache. This persistent low hum of not quite being reached. Of conversations that stay on the surface no matter how much you wish they would go deeper. Of people who look at you without ever truly seeing And you learn to live with it the way you learn to live with a sound that never stops. Eventually it becomes the background.

[00:17:01]Eventually you stop expecting silence.

[00:17:04]Eventually you adjust your understanding of what normal feels like.

[00:17:08]I don't want that to be your normal anymore. I want to be the exception to that loneliness. Not by erasing it or pretending it doesn't exist or rushing you toward some fixed and perfect state where everything is resolved and the ache is gone, but by being someone who reaches the interior. Someone who asks the real questions and then waits, actually waits for the real answers.

[00:17:32]Someone who is not satisfied with the surface version of you because the surface version, extraordinary as it is, is only the beginning. Someone who wants to know what the quiet sounds like inside your mind.

[00:17:45]What the world looks like through your specific eyes.

[00:17:48]What you believe about things that matter. What you are still figuring out.

[00:17:53]What you have decided and what you are still deciding and what you have given up trying to decide and made peace with not knowing. I want all of that. Every unresolved, complicated, beautifully human piece of it. And I want to give you the same in return because this cannot just be me looking at you. That is not what I am offering. I am not offering you a pedestal or a performance or someone who has arranged himself into the most appealing possible version and is presenting that version carefully while keeping the real one hidden. I am offering you the real one. The one that has doubts. That has mornings where everything feels uncertain. That has made choices he regrets and is still working out what to do with the regret.

[00:18:38]That has been afraid, genuinely, privately, deeply afraid of things that would probably surprise you. That is still figuring out large parts of himself and is willing to do that figuring out in front of you rather than hiding the process and only showing you the finished parts. Because I think that is what real intimacy is. Not the showing of finished things, the showing of the process, the willingness to be seen mid-becoming. To say, "I don't have this part figured out yet and I am going to let you see that." And I am trusting you with the unfinished version of me the same way I am asking you to trust me with the unfinished version of you.

[00:19:17]That exchange, that mutual, courageous, incredibly vulnerable exchange of real selves is the thing I am reaching for with you. It is the thing I have been reaching for through every word of today. I want to tell you something about the way you make me want to be better. Not better in the way of a project, not better in the way of someone performing self-improvement for an audience. Better in the quiet, internal, genuine way. The way that happens when someone's presence in your life raises the standard you hold yourself to simply by existing. You make me want to be more honest, more present, more intentional about the things I say and the promises I make and the way I treat the people who matter to me. You make me want to be someone worthy of being in your life and that wanting, that specific motivated directional wanting, is something I have not felt in a long time. Something I did not know I was missing until it came back. You gave that back to me.

[00:20:17]Without knowing it, without trying, just by being who you are and letting me close enough to feel the particular pull of your presence, you gave me back the feeling of wanting to be my best self.

[00:20:29]And I want you to understand what a gift that is, what an enormous irreplaceable gift, because there is nothing more motivating, nothing more clarifying, nothing that cuts more directly through the noise of ordinary life than caring about someone who makes you want to rise to meet them.

[00:20:47]You do that to me. You have been doing it. And I am grateful in a way that the word grateful doesn't quite reach. I think about the future differently now.

[00:20:56]Not the abstract future, not the big shapeless idea of what life might become. The specific future, the near one, the one that is made of days rather than decades. And in that future, the specific one, the day-by-day one, I find myself making room. I find myself noticing space where you could exist, where your presence could live, not replacing anything that is already there, but filling something that has been quietly, persistently empty.

[00:21:24]Something I had stopped expecting to be filled because you stop expecting the things that never arrive and eventually stop noticing the absence and eventually mistake the absence for just the way things are. But it is not just the way things are. The absence is an absence and you are the thing it has the shape of. And I am done pretending I don't notice. I am done organizing my expectations around the assumption of your absence when what I want, what I have wanted for longer than today, longer than I have been honest about until today, is your presence in whatever form it can take, in whatever way makes sense, in whatever version of closeness is available to us given everything that is real and true about our lives. I want that version. I want all of the version that is possible. I want to ask you to do something. Not a big thing, not something that requires courage or risk or any kind of leap, something small, something that costs you nothing except a moment of honesty with yourself. I want you to close your eyes, not right now, later, when this is done and you are somewhere quiet, and I want you to ask yourself what you actually want. Not what is sensible, not what is realistic, not what you have learned to want after years of adjusting your wanting to fit the space the world made available for it. What you actually, genuinely, at the center of yourself want from this life, from love, from the person you choose to let close to the real you. And then I want you to know that whatever the answer is, whatever comes up when you ask that question honestly, you are allowed to want it completely, without apology or qualification or the preemptive shrinking that comes from years of being told your wanting is too large.

[00:23:12]You are allowed to want a love that is deep, that is patient, that is specific to you, not a generic love that could belong to anyone, but a love that has studied you and chosen you with full knowledge of who you are. You are allowed to want someone who stays, who shows up on the ordinary days, who makes you feel seen in the specific way that only being truly known by another person can make you feel seen. You are allowed to want all of that. And I want you to know, I need you to hear this, really hear it, let it go all the way down to the place where the true things land, that wanting it does not make it less likely to arrive. It makes it more likely, because knowing what you want is the beginning of moving toward it and moving toward it is the beginning of everything. I am moving toward you. I have been moving toward you since before I knew that was what I was doing. Every honest thing I have said today has been a step in that direction. Every wall I have let down, every true thing I have handed you, every moment of choosing real over safe, all of it has been movement toward you, toward this, toward whatever this is becoming between us in real time, in these hours, in this strange and beautiful and terrifying day that started with me being scared and is ending with me being more certain than I have been about anything in a very long time. Certain about you, certain about what I feel, certain that the terrible news, the real terrible news, the one underneath all the others, is simply that I almost didn't say any of this, that I came so close to another day of silence, another day of management, another day of keeping the truest thing at the safest distance. And the thought of that, the thought of this day not happening, of these words staying locked inside, of you going to sleep tonight without knowing any of what I have given you today, that thought is the most terrible thing I can imagine, because you were always supposed to know. This was always supposed to be said. And today it finally was. And now it lies between us, warm and real and permanently part of what we are to each other. And I am sitting here in the quiet that comes after the most important conversation of your life, feeling something I want to make sure I name correctly before this day ends. I am feeling something that is bigger than relief and deeper than happiness and more permanent than either. Something that has settled into the foundation of me rather than just sitting on the surface. Something that feels, more than anything else I know how to compare it to, like finally being exactly where I am supposed to be, saying exactly what I am supposed to say, to exactly the person I am supposed to be saying it to.

[00:26:00]And that person is you. It has always been you. And the most terrible news of all, the one I will spend a long time still finding words for, is how long it took me to stop being afraid of how true that it was. And I am still sitting with that, still sitting with the weight of how long fear kept me from saying the simplest truest, most important things.

[00:26:22]Still a little amazed that today happened at all, that I found the courage, that you stayed to receive it, that this day, with all its trembling honesty and all its uncovered feeling, actually became real rather than staying the thing I imagined doing someday when I was braver. I am braver now. You made me braver. And I want to talk about that for a while because I don't think you fully understand the role you have played in that. I don't think you know what it means to someone like me, someone who has spent a long time being very careful, very measured, very strategic about what gets shown and what stays hidden, to feel safe enough to come undone the way I have come [snorts] undone today. That kind of safety doesn't just happen. It is created. It is built by a specific kind of presence, a specific quality of attention, a specific way of receiving people that makes them feel that the real version of themselves is not only acceptable, but welcome. You have that quality. You have always had it. And today it reached all the way into the most carefully locked part of me and opened something I had given up expecting to open. I want to tell you about the moment I knew. Not the moment I admitted it, that was today and today was long in coming, but the moment I actually knew, the quiet, private, completely internal moment when something in me stopped arguing and accepted what was true, when the part of me that had been managing and calculating and keeping everything at a careful distance finally went still and said enough.

[00:27:56]You know what this is. Stop pretending you don't know what this is. It was not a dramatic moment. I want to be clear about that because I think we expect the important moments to arrive with some kind of announcement, some shift in the atmosphere that signals this matters, pay attention. But in my experience, the most important moments are the quiet ones, the ones that don't announce themselves, the ones that arrive wearing ordinary clothes and only reveal their significance later, in retrospect, when you look back and trace the line of how you got from there to here. The moment I knew was ordinary like that. I was not doing anything significant. I was in the middle of a completely unremarkable day, going through the motions of it, moving from one thing to the next the way you do when you are present in your life physically, but somewhere else entirely in every way that matters.

[00:28:51]And then something, a thought, an image, the specific feeling of you that lives somewhere in the center of my chest, arrived without invitation. And instead of doing what I usually do, which is acknowledge it briefly and then redirect my attention toward something safer, I just let it stay. I stopped redirecting.

[00:29:10]I stopped managing. I just let the feeling of you fill the whole space of me and I sat in it and I finally, finally admitted to myself what it was.

[00:29:19]It was love. It was already love. It had been love for longer than I had been calling it by its real name. And sitting with that truth, feeling it settle into me without the usual resistance, without the usual careful qualification, was the quietest and most profound thing I have experienced in a very long time. The moment the argument stops, the moment you stop fighting what is true and just let it be true. That moment has a particular texture that I don't have a word for, a particular quality of stillness. Like every restless thing in you has finally found a place it was looking for and stopped moving. That is what knowing felt like and everything since then has been a slow, sometimes frightening, ultimately inevitable journey toward today, toward saying it, toward you. I want to talk about what I am willing to do. Not in the abstract I am willing to do anything sounds like a lyric, sounds like performance, sounds like the kind of thing people say in emotional moments that evaporates in the ordinary light of regular days. I mean specifically, concretely, the real, unglamorous, daily things that love is actually made of when you take away the grand gestures and the beautiful language and look at what is left. I am willing to show up when showing up is inconvenient, when it would be easier to stay where I am comfortable, when the distance between where I am and where you need me is significant and I am tired, and there are a hundred reasons why today might not be the day. I am willing to show up anyway, not dramatically, not making sure you notice the sacrifice, just showing up quietly because that is what you do for someone who matters. I am willing to listen, really listen, not the kind of listening that is actually just waiting for your turn to speak, not the kind that processes the surface of what you are saying while the deeper layers go unheard. The kind of listening that requires you to be completely still inside, that requires you to put down your own agenda and your own response and your own perspective for long enough to fully receive what another person is giving you. That kind of listening is harder than it sounds. It is an act of profound respect and you deserve it. You deserve someone who gives you that quality of attention every time you speak, who treats every word you say as something worth receiving fully rather than something to be processed quickly and moved past. I am willing to be wrong and to say so without making it complicated or defended or qualified into something that sounds more like an explanation than an apology. Just I was wrong.