I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. Mostly because life’s been repeatedly asking me to face it.
When faced with things, I tend to turn to books. Surely, the wisdom of others who have been through the trenches has been compiled somewhere.
The details might vary, but the consensus seems to be that when you’re afraid, you have to face your fear.
Groundbreaking, I know. But something we tend to forget in the tight grip of fear.
It’s a fact of life that it’s easier to make things worse than to make them better. Maybe I’m just getting older, or maybe things were getting a little too real, but denial or avoidance felt immature and unsatisfying, not to mention, like a useless dead end.
I made myself turn around and look at what I didn’t want to look at. Every rejection, every door closed in my face, every boiling self-doubt that surfaced. Again and again and again. I didn’t know if I had it in me. As unpalatable as it seemed, I knew I had to dig deeper.
Something that hit me right where it hurt was this:
The more you turn away or avoid what you fear, the bigger it gets, and the smaller you feel.
It hurt because it’s so true.
When you run away from what you fear, you get smaller and it gets bigger. You realize you’re playing small, and the shame of it compounds the fear. Then you’re left facing a fear bigger than whatever the thing was in the first place.
Maybe you weren’t really tested before, and now it’s the real deal. When you closest friends deceive you. When your body fails to do what you’ve always been used to. When the new changes at work threaten the comfort of your old ways.
When the tectonic plates start shifting, the foundation on which we built our self-image starts to rock. Then we find out whether it was indeed made of rock-solid principles, strength of character, and core values, or if it was made of sand.
This is incredibly uncomfortable, but necessary.
The solution, the answer we seek is on the other side of fear, i.e., the hell we don’t to go through. This is where endurance comes in, and a chance to see if we’re actually the kind of person that we tell other people, and ourselves, we are.
It’s a good idea to heed your fears. To break them down into smaller pieces, and look deeper into them. To wake up. To realize that life wants you to learn something you didn’t need to learn before or something you were avoiding.
As it happens, when you stare right back at fear, it starts to shrink and fade.
Much of life is about building that fear-facing muscle. The paradox is that as much as we don’t want to do so (commonly known as “growth”), it is exactly what gives meaning, satisfaction and fulfillment to our lives.
When things fall apart, it’s not about what fell apart. It’s about what remains standing.
All you need to begin is to turn around, open your eyes, and stand tall.
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