Haunted by Headlines

This story comes with a trigger warning because a couple of women who’d been in similar circumstance were triggered to relive something they were trying to forget. I wrote this story from the memory of an actual event in the early 1970’s. Names were changed to protect the innocent, and a little literary license was taken to make it a better story. However, the fear I felt was real, and retelling the story brought it back. I felt it important to include here because fear changes the way a woman moves through the world and we learn it in our childhood.

Not always in loud or visible ways, but in the quiet adjustments—the longer route home, the glance over the shoulder, the way your body learns to listen before your mind can name why. Instructions spoken calmly—don’t stop unless you’re in a public place—don’t just pass through you. They stay. They settle. They become instinct.

I wanted to capture that invisible shift. The moment when ordinary spaces—sidewalks, streetlights, the walk to work—stop being neutral and begin to hum with something else. Not because something has happened, but because you now understand that it could.

But beneath that, there was something deeper unfolding.

Because fear doesn’t just heighten awareness—it reveals it.

It sharpens the senses, yes—but it also strips away illusion. It brings you into your body. Into presence. Into a kind of knowing that exists beneath logic. The kind that asks: What do I feel? What do I trust? How do I move now?

In that way, this story became more than a moment of tension. It became a doorway. A remembering.

Of instinct, voice, of the quiet, constant intelligence we’re taught to override in order to appear calm, agreeable, unafraid. And maybe even more than that—it became part of my own return.

Because there’s a version of a woman who walks through the world disconnected from herself… and there’s a version who’s awake to every signal, every shift, every truth moving beneath the surface.

This story lives in that space between the two.

Where nothing outwardly happens—and yet everything changes.

Where fear enters—and something deeper rises to meet it.

Not just survival—awareness.

And, slowly—the beginning of an authentic life that listens to itself.