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Here's what I wish I knew earlier in life: layered beneath the buried feelings of anger, shame, guilt, grief, desperation, desire, and resentment were my core fears. And, just beyond those fears was my power. For so long, I was blocked from dreaming or taking healthy risks because I was unwilling to even acknowledge my fears, to feel how deep they existed within me, and to confront them.
Facing our fears is not just uncomfortable, it's painful. For decades, we are conditioned to believe the stories they tell us or reinforce about the world, about other people, about ourselves. Since their formation, we have been salving and sedating them, nursing them, and protecting them from being seen or touched. Our fears, after all, are the greatest protectors of our wounds.
Confronting our fears requires questioning our identity, our morality, our sense of safety, our self-worth, our understanding of the world, our beliefs, our values, our relationships, the decisions we’ve made so far, the life we’re living, and the list goes on and on. It’s daunting to even begin to break down and challenge our fears. It requires openness, grieving, risk taking, and discipline. Frankly, it requires a release of things we love: control, comfort, and conforming.
The start of my leaps of faith to face my fears began when I moved to Florida, I thought of it as the freshest of starts. I knew no one, I had no major commitments, it was as blank-a-slate as many thirty-somethings are offered. I assumed, I would just go… sprint into the vision I had for my life and what I wanted to create. You may notice by now a optimistic disillusionment.
But, I have never been short on ideas or ambition. I thought I would fall into step on this fresh start having just been through one of the most difficult times in my life.
That was not the case. After nearly an entire year of starts and stops in the creative process, I realized something deeper was happening. It got to the point where I had created and abandoned multiple project plans with multiple launch dates, I had branding and vision boards with multiple logo iterations, I detailed plans A through E, and I was still stuck in place.
I can laugh about it now, but at the time, it was infuriating and I was shaming myself every hour on the hour for not pushing forward. Imagine: you have the time and energy to finally live the life of your dreams and you are the only thing in your way.
Your ego remembers all the times you have been hurt. It tries desperately to protect you from taking risks, even the healthy ones, even the safe ones. You feel this overwhelming anxiety to choose your right path in the right way, to make sure it will be healthy, happy, and fulfilling. Don’t make the wrong decision of where to start or how to start. Is this even the right path? Can you do this? What if you run out of money? What if you’re poor? What if you have to move home? What if you fail and never do anything of consequence with your life? Are you ready? I don’t know if you’re ready. You have to be X, Y and Z when you do this! Don’t mess it up! This is your one chance! There is no room for mistakes or failure, everything is on the line, and you have to get it right, you have to make the right decision. There is a perfect decision and you have to make it. You're running out of time, make it. Make it! Do it! Do something! Now!!!
Your ego is telling you to be perfect before you choose and to be perfect in your choice of the perfect choice.
And, I froze. No wonder I froze. Who can operate under such pressure and chaos. This outweighed the excitement, willingness, hope, and conviction I had in myself and in my vision.
With those voices lurking quietly in the background of my subconscious I was scared to actually try. I want to really reinforce that I wasn’t fully aware of this narrative scheming below the surface… until I sat in stillness, until I surrendered, finally, to figure out what the hell was going on.
I want to tell you I decided to surrender peacefully. But, the truth is, the week of my 34th birthday, the universe grounded me and I was forced to face the deep fears.
It's a longer story, but the highlights are a first-degree sunburn, Black Widow bite, trip to the ER, bed rest, breathwork, and a lot of sobbing.
During that breathwork session I was working through money insecurity, that’s what I thought the core fear was. But, what came up was how unworthy and wrong/bad I felt... and had felt for a saddening amount of my life. I felt it in my core, in my stomach, up my throat, across my collarbones. It was everywhere, it felt heavy and low.
The deeper I went into that feeling, I could see it and feel it for what it was: a scared, sad, angry child. A child that was desperate to be seen and validated and released from that dark place within. The place that I trapped her because I was too scared to feel what she felt, for far too long.
So, I faced what I had been avoiding. I felt what she felt: the culmination of every time I felt unworthy, wrong, and not enough in my life. I allowed the feelings to flood my body and I sobbed.
I spoke kind words, loving words, empowering words about how much I love her and believe in her and how strong she is, how proud I am, how capable she is and always has been. And, slowly the feeling lifted.
Coming out of that experience, I realized that my creativity was still coming from a place of pain: a core fear of unworthiness.
I was still trying to get others to validate the wisdom I saw in myself, the capableness, the power, the goodness, the intelligence. I wanted others to echo what I saw in me. But, without realizing it, I was actually prioritizing their perspective over my own. Which means, I was preemptively bracing myself against all the cruel, hateful, and harmful words that could be cast my way too. You're ugly. You're stupid. You're naive. You're worthless. Because if they said it and I feared it, it must be true.
No. I was allowing myself to be held back by what people could say, what people could feel, how they could perceive me. And, my assumptions about those views and words were negative.
Why would I listen to voices that want the worst for me, who see the worst in me?
As a kid, in our early development, we internalize a lot. We collect a lot of voices that can be incredibly unkind, misguided, mistaken, and even cruel. As my therapist told me, "you have a negative bias. You reject the good things people say about you and only believe the negative." It was time to challenge those negative assumptions and fear the only way I could: jumping in. I started putting myself out there. I posted on social media, I started having conversations and lunches with strangers, I shared my writing... and the worst didn't happen. Instead, I began to build my confidence. Did I have anxiety when I created, posted, shared, stumbled in conversations? Yes... and I breathed through it. It gets easier.
Our body's attempt to keep us safe will come at the cost of our dreams. Our dreams cannot be fostered, cultivated or grown in a place of comfort and without taking leaps of faith. We have to move in the face of our fears, knowing them and why they are there, and choosing something better for ourselves.
Facing my fears, especially those around unworthiness, is a constant practice. But, in this place of willingness to move through them, I fell into an inner power and confidence I had never known. Thus, leading me into the next stage of my journey: claiming my personal power.