Fear (Owning It)
Folks, this is one helluva journey.
“Fear is the #1 way to not make money.” Gary Vee said that. And boy oh boy, I have experience in that department.
Maybe you do too.
The thing about fear and self-made barriers is … well … sometimes there’s good reason for them.
Don’t you think?
Let’s give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. For those of us who desire success, we didn’t come up with these fears out of nowhere. There’s a reason we stop ourselves.
We’ve been through things. Dark things. Bad things. Hard things. Things we wish we didn’t have to go through. But they happened anyway.
I took myself to therapy for a while. And the more I cuss people out, the more I think to myself, “Maybe I should go back …”
I don’t have a life coach, I don’t have a death coach, and I don’t want either of them. I have a few friends and a list of love affairs that haven’t gone well.
I’m not perfect. I’m nowhere close to perfect. I will never be perfect. I GOT PROBLEMS, SON! But Gary is right. “Fear is the #1 way to not make money.”
Doing It Anyway
All I’ve ever wanted to do is be a writer. It’s been my dream since I was 10. Before that I wanted to be a meteorologist (I loved the movie Twister and have always been fascinated by weather). I have had moments of great triumph in life, triumph that has little to do with writing and triumph that is directly related to writing.
Folks, if you’ve been alive for a couple days, you have realized life is controversial.
All life. Is controversial.
It’s impossible to escape that.
Some of us embrace that, some of us struggle with it. Repress it. Get tripped up. Me? I’ve been tripped up.
Which is not how I started out. I started out embracing the ugliness. Sleeping with it. Running with it.
As a new adult, lots of my ideas were based on tearing things down. Challenging things. I liked in-your-face people like Marilyn Manson and Malcom X, Iggy Pop and Hunter S. Thompson and JT LeRoy.
But when you get older, when you build something and it all comes crashing down, your ideas change.
Or, at least, they should.
What’s my fear? Yes, it is judgment. I’m afraid of being judged. Judged for my character flaws, judged for my mistakes, judged for behaviors, judged for my current and previous income levels, judged for real values — judged for everything.
I’m not old — not by a long shot — but I am old enough to have made devastating mistakes and terrible choices.
I’m old enough to screw up. I’m old enough to be ashamed. Old enough to have made enemies. Old enough to be threatened.
I learned the truth of a cliché: “Hurt people hurt people.” I used to turn my nose up at that thought. But now? Now I get it.
I have hurt people. And I have hurt myself. And I wish that wasn’t true.
But it is.
I’m not old — not by a long shot — but I am older. And I’m tired of letting the fear win.
I will be judged, just like you. Some judgment is fair, some judgment isn’t — just like with you. But I am here to begin. To start with the fear churning alive and well, instead of struggling in silence and putting it off.
Life is beautiful. Life is short.
And here I am. Beginning.
I’m not going to tell you to ignore the fear. I’m not going to tell you that I’ve overcome it, because I haven’t.
But I am doing it anyway.
