I want to share with you a bit about my old friend Fear.
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I thought I knew fear and I did. I had such chronic anxiety as a child that I had headaches every day after school from the stress of trying to hold it together, trying to be a good girl. A good student, a good person.
Every night I was afraid to sleep because of the nightmares.
I knew fear and it did not look like a friend to me.
But over the years, I became less and less fearful.
Most of the anxieties that plagued me began to fall away as I saw that I was okay. Just really, I was okay.
It was wonderful to no longer feel afraid like that.
But almost two years ago I noticed that fear doesn’t always feel like fear and it was running my life without me noticing.
Fear is about is the way you see the world. That’s where it comes from. It’s not really a thing at all. It’s thought.
A thought that comes along and says, “I’m not safe if I fill in the blank. It’s not okay for me to do this thing. I don’t want this thing to happen.” When you have that thought, it feels like fear in your body.
But then it gets sneaky.
I took that fearful thought and made it into my world without seeing it. All those things I thought were scary. The things it wasn’t safe for me to do or say.
I started constructing my world and navigating the world of fear I made up to avoid ever having to feel fear.
There were just places in my life I didn’t go. The fear would come in the form of telling myself I just wasn’t interested in it. “I don’t want those things. I don’t need anything else.:
And all the while it was fear behind the wheel of my life. It was fearful thinking creating the scaffolding of my world, and it was invisible to me.
I’ve heard it said that there are only two things in the world:
Fear and love.
Fear in any form is a tightening. A contraction. Tension. Pressure. Stress.
Call it what you will – that’s fear.
Then there is love. An opening. Expansiveness. Spaciousness. It’s big. It feels like curiosity. That’s love.
When we let it be as simple as it is, navigating life becomes simple. I know when I’m walking in fear by how it feels. And I know when I’m being lived and drawn by love by how it feels.
I’m getting wise to the ways that I hide fear behind my preferences and judgements of what’s realistic and what is not. I notice with curiosity.
But it makes less and less sense to follow the directives of fear.
But can I call fear my friend?
I am willing to consider it.
Not because fear follows through on its promises to keep me safe. It doesn’t. It keeps me small. It sometimes keeps me from feeling fear by avoiding anything I think might cause it, even though none of those things ever do.
But I’m willing to see fear as a friend because it lets me know how I’m using my beautiful mind.
If I couldn’t feel fearful, I couldn’t know I was hurting myself. I might be lost to it forever.
So yeah, fear sounds useful, if I’m not quite on friendly terms with it just yet.
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