The F Word
How Fear is robbing you of your best life
We all know Fear, perhaps more intimately than we desire to know. I am 38 years old and I am tired of listening to that drowning in fear anxious voice inside my head. Like bone tired. Like it wont let me sleep, please stop tired. Like I am missing the present because I am regretting my past or imagining the worst for my future tired.
Every time I look at a picture of me from the yesteryears, I see my fear friend staring back at me. I see it in my hesitant smile and in the reluctant look in my eyes — Fear has always kept me, and my happiness in check and it has always betrayed my best show of happiness.
Here are some the “truths” Fear has shared with me over the years.
1. You are not really that smart or any good or worthy
2. That was not that hard to achieve, anyone could have figured all that out
3. That big success is for those “other” people, you are not destined for that
4. You cannot do this you’re just not tough enough
5. You are a horrible mom who traumatizes her kids because you are not patient or around for them
6. You are selfish, you only think about yourself
7. You work too hard and you use that as an excuse to not do all the other things you should be doing like working out or being a good mom and wife
8. You don’t work hard enough, you are always looking for excuses to not work hard
9. You don’t deserve your good husband and kids, you take them for granted
10. You are such a complainer, you always whine
11. You always play the victim
12. You always blame others
13. You don’t speak up enough because you overanalyze everything
14. You don’t listen enough, you talk too much because you are not patient enough to listen
15. You don’t have what it takes
16. You have what it takes, you are just lazy
17. You are too rude
18. You are too nice
19. Why cant you just be happy like everyone else — you have everything yet you complain?
20. You don’t deserve to be happy or enjoy yourself
Growing up in India, my mom would often say “Don’t laugh too much, you will cry as much as you laugh”. She believed that happiness is just a holding pattern till the next shoe drops, so don’t get comfortable. I believed her and as a mature adult I still live in the constant fear that happiness is a temporary reprieve in the struggle that life inevitably is. My mother lost her mother when she was 12. Her father never married again and resigned himself to seeking out a life of solitude and eventually decided that marriage was the best possible outcome for his motherless daughter. My mother never went to college — she went from the house of her emotionally absent father to an emotionally cruel husband. When I look at her wedding pictures — my mother looks regally stoic. She was breathtakingly beautiful and I see my same reluctant smile and hesitant gaze in her through all her wedding pictures and all her pictures that followed through the years. That look of Fear, where we hold back our light that is inevitably our essence because we are anticipating our next struggle or disappointment. I cannot say for sure if my mom ever really knew life without fear. Maybe the loss of a mother so early on in life puts you in that mindset that you are not really in control, so you must continue to fear the unknown in anticipation of it. I realize now that when she was making that statement to us all through the years, she was repeating her fears and maybe even trying to protect us from our fears by trying to normalize disappointment. She did, what we are all guilty of doing — projecting our experiences onto the world and reciting it like it is the universal truth and just like that, fear continues to be recycled over and over again through our collective human experience.
I moved to America at age 17 from India for college. I was alone, I had never been here, and I did not really know anyone beyond a distant cousin in St Louis. When people hear that, the first question is always “Were you scared?”. The truth is, I was not. I was, perhaps abnormally so, calm and ready to start a new chapter. My home life until then was unpredictable and filled with painful memories of emotional abuse and domestic violence. Was it the fear of not having a say in how my life played out, that pushed me to fearlessly pursue a different path? YES. Fear is also the first thing I reach for when life feels unpredictable because it fuels me to push my limits. Fast Forward 20 years from when I first landed on the shores of NYC, life has played out just fine. I am healthy, I have a comfortable life in Colorado surrounded by breathtaking nature, I have a beautiful family: a husband who I am convinced is a Buddha reincarnate, and two healthy kids who are just bursting at the seams with joy. Deep down I know for a fact, that despite all my fears, life has worked out more perfectly than I imagined. I understand that all the hardships along the way had their purpose and that happiness is always right here in the now. Yet, Fear remains my steadfast companion, perhaps more than it ever was in the days when everything felt bleak and hopeless. Turns out, Fear is also the first thing I reach for when life feels predictable and easy because it reminds me to not get too comfortable and wait anxiously for the unpredictable to return.
As I am writing this, my first-born son who is 8 and in my view an old soul walked in. As I often engage him to seek his advice on life’s most meaningful questions, I asked him, “Do you have Fear?” and the below conversation ensued.
H: Everyone fears something. I fear the dark and monsters.
Me: Do you ever have a voice in your head that tells you that you cannot do something?
H: My voice never tells me I cannot do something, it always tells me I can do it.
Me: So what would you tell others who feel fearful often?
H: Take a deep breathe and….Believe.
Adults often attribute children’s ability to master anything as their lack of “fear” and it is often noted like they have an innate superpower that the rest of us don’t possess. Yet, when you really think about it, children unlike adults are simply able to observe what is, without judgment, determine what serves them and what does not and proceed. Take a child learning to walk. They learn quickly that they can stand back up again and keep walking like they were before the fall and maybe even go a couple of steps further. They do not fear the fall, they just fall and stand up again and get on with the business of walking. No judgment or hyperbole is attached to it — they think about addressing what is directly in front. For a child, there is no active thinking in getting to the next step, there is only setting of intention, active doing and cause and effect to learn from. They trust the process and flow through it. If children feared the fall, they would never learn to walk. Fearing is not part of their psychology, they just “take a deep breathe and believe”. For adults, our fear takes over before intention is ever set and voice of the heart is overrun by overactive chatter of the mind before we have even started.
All that said, Fear does serve a purpose. It is a primal instinct to keep you and your loved ones safe. Like if you wake up in he middle of camping one night and feel the warm breathe of a grizzly 5 inches from your face, fear makes you lay still and play dead. Fear has its limited but very useful purpose of keeping us safe, and that should never be ignored. However, beyond keeping us alive, Fear does very little in terms of helping us thrive in life. Mark Twain once said “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened”. This holds true for most of us, if we were to truly map out our biggest fears and worries over the last decade, most, if not all of them never came true. Yet, we believe in and dress rehearse with fear, creating stories in our mind of eventualities and people and outcomes – all because it is easier to fear than it is to just believe in ourselves and forge ahead with all what we do in life. It is easier to critique ourselves than it is to root for ourselves. As Marianne Williamson rightly said “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us”
Here is what I have learned about Fear. You cannot out talk fear, you can only wait for it to finish its perpetual rant and then take a deep sigh and a small step forward. You can never win with Fear, it will take the opposite side of whatever it is you are advocating for because Fear believes it only wants the best for you. Fear ignores all facts and historical data that prove its warnings to be without reason or logic. You cannot rationalize with Fear. Fear’s biggest friend is your ego, and its biggest enemy is the calm clarity found in the stillness of your heart. Fear is not just a liar, as it is often said. Fear is a thief who robs you of your truth and your highest potential. Fear takes away your hope and makes you believe that this abyss of despair that you find yourself free falling into again and again, this feeling of quiet desperation and perpetual melancholy with temporary moments of fleeting joy is all there is and all you are worthy of. Fear keeps you from trying, from taking that first step. When you tell fear, “but things have always worked out — you have been wrong before”, fear will gnarl back and tell you that THIS time will be different and we keep carrying on with our song buried deep in our hearts. Fear talks over that soft, but resolute voice of our higher selves that always seems to know the truth before we can even think it. Fear will do what it can to keep you from ever putting one foot forward the other because it is in our hesitation that Fear finds its fuel. The bubbling cauldron of my fearful brain never takes a rest from the moment I wake up till the moment I go to sleep. Fear does not discriminate and Fear does not rest.
As Paul Coelho said in the Alchemist “Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart…. Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you will find your treasure.” I have found that for all the self help books that have ever been written, my son’s simple wisdom of “take a deep breathe and believe” is the simplest way to just live your best life. I take a deep breathe, seek out that soft voice that is speaking to me the truth I already know and then just do it. I take that first step before Fear can speak its doubt and that has made all the difference. For every negative or fearful thought that keeps me from trying, I ask myself “Does this serve me? Is this who I want to be?”. The answer is always an unequivocal No and with that, I stumble forward with my best intentions. Not listening to my fears does not mean I don’t fail or make mistakes. It just means that I don’t paralyze myself speculating about the outcome. I just keep putting one foot ahead of the other and experiencing all that life has to offer and usually that leads to the best outcomes I have found. I have never looked back on my life and found a single instance where I regretted choosing to follow my heart and not listening to my fears. Not one. single. time.
My brother in law once said to me “I think of fear as a pack of wolves. When I start to feel the fear, I just say to myself, the wolves are back and I know that I just need to get on with it”. I always found that analogy to be so powerful. Fear is a pack of wolves that will stand at the periphery, growl and snarl and attack without notice if you let them in. Fear is relentless and hungry for your attention but stare it down, take your power back and do what you already know in your heart to be true and watch it dissipate even if for a little while and that may be all the time you need to run past it and get on with living your best life.
The F Word
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