Let's talk about Fear. Fear is one of the toughest nuts to crack. A friend of mine is fearless. She is like a bulldozer. Piss her off and she will run you down. She does not fear much.
But what she does fear terrifies her. Scratch the surface of anyone who doesn't seem to fear anything and you will find it, somewhere in the depths, the overriding fear that eats into their soul.
When I was growing up, I was afraid a lot. I lived so closely with fear that I didn't even know it was there. I have always been a highly sensitive person (there's a website for us and everything!). I have intensive emotional radar, crowds of people overwhelm me and I even have atypical, highly sensitive pain receptors. In my younger years, I was practically a raw nerve.
So where do you think I grew up? My dad was an alcoholic with PTSD from the Vietnam war, and my mom was a narcissist concerned about making our family look "normal" at any price. It was like putting a burn victim in a dodgeball game. Niiiiice.
Growing up, I learned to tread carefully, to hide my feelings, to present only the homogenized, prettied-up version of myself (and definitely wear lip gloss). I learned that if I wanted to earn my parents' love, I needed to be someone else. My feelings were ignored or laughed at. I had very few places I could be myself, and even then, I internalized my mom's skepticism and questioned everything I perceived. I didn't know what the truth was, and I certainly didn't know who I was. I had every reason to hide from everything.
Fear was a friend in those days. I always knew when to disappear upstairs, when to hide from the yelling, and when to bury my nose in a book. But growing up like that made me extra careful, extra hidden.
Fear serves a purpose. It helps us survive until we can be free, until we can walk away from danger on our own two feet. Fear helps us win in the end. But what happens when you're free? Do you automatically get the key to your own cage and fly away into happily ever WTF? Unfortunately, no. Our fears stay in place, even though we have moved on. It's our job to dismantle them, piece by piece.
When I moved out, I began choosing very interesting cages for myself. Everything I perceived was still filtered through my upbringing, but I slowly began to learn about who I was, what I felt, and what made me feel safe. Even my crappiest relationship taught me how to stand up for myself, how to face my fears and push through to survival, finding a sanctuary and building my nest elsewhere.
Since I started this blog, I have been facing fear after fear. There's a particular dilemma I face every day, when I'm looking at my life and what I want to accomplish. It's two swords pointing at me, and I'm right in the middle. One is Impossible Perfectionism and the other is Self-Sabotage.
When I was growing up, if I got six gold stars and one silver star, the silver star was frowned upon, discussed, lectured about. I developed serious perfectionistic issues, and still fight with every letter I type, the urge to change it before I even type it. I want to be perfect with every! keystroke!
So one of my coping mechanisms has always been self-sabotage. In sixth grade, we were assigned a 1 - 2 page report on the subject of our choice. We spent weeks learning about outlines and index cards and research and blah blah blah. I read or talked with friends during every study period. The night before the report, I read a couple of books and whipped up a one page report on the piranha, with a picture I traced from the encyclopedia. Got an A+.
All through college, I used this model. If I waited until the last possible minute to write a paper, then I would be happy with whatever I got, because of my time constraints. I couldn't be held to my impossible standard of perfection. I could be happy with any grade, because at least I turned something in.
So, either Impossible Perfectionism or Self-Sabotage. Current Day Me says no thanks. I'm using this blog for many things, but an unforeseen side effect happens to be a sidestep out of the path of the swords. Yes, I will have goals and I will achieve them, but I will not go for perfection. I will not allow my fear of not being good enough to rickroll me into not writing at all.
Pushing through these fears is a stutter step movement at best, sometimes pulling me back to where I started. But for once, it really is about the journey. I'm learning the steps to a dance that will carry me through any struggle in life. I get to learn about what will work for me in any situation, when I decide to Stop Being Afraid, Right Now.
Fear is a gift. Fear tells you when you're getting close to solving your problems. It doesn't seem like that at the time, as your heart races and you sweat buckets and your head explodes and you cry for hours. But getting past those physical and emotional reactions to actually face and do the thing you fear will free you in a way you never knew possible.
What would it be like to walk through your fear and be free? We're all finding out, one step at a time.
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