This Feels Like…Fear.

What if I told you that fear is not always dangerous, and if harnessed, can be a tool for energy and self awareness?

I love to write, but writing is my greatest fear. For many this statement may sound like an oxymoron or a form of self sabotage…I can confirm, it is! Fear is our greatest weapon to prevent us from fulfilling our hopes, our dreams and our deep-all-encompassing desires. Over the past year, I’ve tried to unpack my fears, all in an attempt to move through them and understand their why.

Through my research, which consists of hours of reading, mindset coaching, meditation, therapy and studying the wisdom of Gay Hendricks, Elizabeth Gilbert and the legendary Brene Brown, I’ve come to accept that my own fear is a product of a gross-misunderstanding around what fear is and why we experience it. It’s important to note, I have not mastered my own fears; I am a proud work in progress. I am on a journey to love fear, even my biggest ones. In fact, the catalyst for this editorial series is driven by fear, and learning to channel my fears into passion.

When I set off on my journey to understand fear, I vowed to remind myself of a universal truth: we are fundamentally taught to view fear in a way that keeps us hostage to it. Let’s get real: for many of us, accepting rejection feels more painful than avoiding what we fear being rejected by…or so we tell ourselves. Rather than view fear as a catalyst for growth, or a means to understand what we love, we view fear as “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous.”

But, what if I told you that fear is not always dangerous, and if harnessed, can be a tool for energy and self awareness?

Fear as Energy:

Fear is a tool for energy depletion and a product of your body’s natural fear-response: fight, flight or freeze. When we exist in a mindset of fear, we create a constant stress response, as our bodies are subconsciously responding in survival-mode as we face “danger.” While, for the most part, we have evolved from facing daily bodily threats, our minds still chemically respond to fear when stressed. Although there are many incredibly valid, raw, and complicated reasons why this response is still within our DNA, many of us have spent an extraneous amount of time creating fear-stress patterns for non-life-threatening circumstances. Personally, my fears are conditional and are most present around my creativity. I have built an unrealistic & maniacal list of conditions that I claimed “I needed,” in order to sit down and write. For years, I insisted I needed total silence, 8 hours of sleep, a free evening during a day when I had few meetings, a light dinner, my phone on airplane mode, and 3 hours to spare to only write. Frankly, these conditions have always been unobtainable based on my lifestyle…I created them as a means by which I can maintain a fear-mindset. For over a decade, I convinced myself that if I didn’t have those conditions, my writing would suffer. As a result, every time I sat down to write, without these “perfect” conditions, my energy levels would drop. My fears would have paralyzed my creativity, depleting my emotional resources, and leaving me fatigued with very little artistic strength to muster.

So what have I been doing to work through this? I choose to see fear is energy. By viewing fear as energy, we become more mindful of the fear-driven, draining thoughts that occupy our minds. When we use all of our energy to build a false narrative around “our worth” and “what is good”, we create a cycle of association around how we need to feel to pursue our passions.

Rather that saying: “ I am too tired to write because I have no energy,” I am shifting my language to say: “I can write whenever and wherever, because I no longer reserve my energy for fear.”

Fear as Self Awareness:

Gay Hendrick’s identifies fear as “excitement without breath.” It is undeniable that fear can take many shapes and forms, however, when fear is present within creativity, it can be seen as a indicator that we may have a deep love and passion for what we claim we are afraid of… The truth is, we are often are fearful of failure and rejection from what we deeply enjoy doing.

In 2019, I began to question whether or not creative writing was right for me. Every time I set forth to “create,” my anxiety would sky rocket. As a result, I assumed that anything that was causing me such extreme overwhelm, must not be something I am not genuinely interested in. Day in and day out this cycle continued, and everytime I had resigned to the belief that “I must not enjoy writing”, something felt disingenuous in my conclusions.

I began to address my concerns and doubts to my coach, Ben Easter, and he helped me realize that I can choose to be more self-aware by sitting with the discomfort of my fears. Rather than suppress my fears, run from them or assume they meant I was in the the wrong, he encouraged me to understand them and to become more self aware in my body as I experienced fear.

The first question he asked me to ponder was: when do I experience fear, and where in my body do I feel it?

As I began to become more self-aware around fear, I quickly realized, my fears only became present when I began to execute on a creative projects I enjoyed…speficially writing. For my entire adult life, my anxious thoughts have been a means of protecting myself from being rejected or creating work that wasn’t “perfect.”

Through this level of self awareness, I started to unpack my understanding of fear by taking a step back, closing my eyes and listening to my body and asking myself three questions to go deeper?

What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?

If I “fail”, or my work is unseen, how does my life change?

Do I want to pursue my creative dreams? If so, what baby step can I take right now to get one inch closer and move through my discomfort ?

These 3 questions have become my mantras and the way in which I become more self aware around fear. They provoke me to get uncomfortable, and to be present in my fears in order to move through them. By speaking them into existence, I am able to change my relationship to fear and become more self aware.

Get Uncomfortable — Change your relationship to fear:

The journey to understand our fears in long, evolving and unique. While each of us experiences fear differently, we share many of the same values. Writing this article was hard for me…it was scary. I was fearful, despite my changing mindset and that is OK. To anyone and everyone unpacking their fears, remember understanding fear as a tool of energy and self-awareness, can provide the same bravery it took me to create this post within you.

When we find the courage to tap into our vulnerabilities and challenge our own thoughts behaviors, greatness reveals itself.

Your fear does not define you. You define it.