Is There Fear Behind Our Fear?

Remember when I said that I love love?

Well, I meant it whole-heartedly.

I can feel when my heart shuts off to love and when it can’t hold itself back.

When it shuts off, my attention to people and to women becomes blurred. I indulge in the stoic side of myself and the spark of empathy and consideration to flirt or open up conversations becomes nothing more than an annoyance.

But, when it opens?

My whole body responds.

It’s fluttering and rushing and warm.

My blood flushes, my focus goes erratic, and I all my desire is wanting eye contact, hearing soft or strong voices in response to my own, and wanting touch.

Physiologically, I know my body wants love. And I know how healthy it is to have it…and how unhealthy it is to not.

…

A long time ago I had good reason to turn away from love and people.

It was new fear that made me shut off. And it was voluntary.

Fear of one thing more than anything: fear of not knowing myself.

I fell in love with someone.

My first real love.

You know the kind.

It’s the kind that, as a man, you unashamedly stop trying to overly protect your identity and your flaws. The type of love where you’re not afraid to be goofy, to be “unsmooth”, as my ex puts it. You’re not afraid to be a mush in front of your friends and family and admit you’re twitterpated.

And it was when this same person, in the end, shed every other layer of me that was too flaky and too unintentional. Without even dissecting me, this person pulled everything deceptive and avoidant out of me because she loved me without fear.

And it was that strength that brought the truth of how untruthful I was being to myself to the surface.

It was me that was afraid.

After years of conditioning myself into something that was common, accepted, and definitily loved.

But it wasn’t me. Not the real me anyway.

She had fallen in love with a surface level version of me. A tinge of personality and character that was appealing and sexy and confident.

But how could she had known that I had no core? How could she have known that I didn’t have something that I loved that made life full, that I needed to live for, that was a reason for me to exist?

And then it showed itself. That disturbing, dark, vacuum-like void that had no light of self, no substance, no color, no complexity and wisdom.

Just…the nothing.

…

The end was ugly.

I made it harder than it had to be, I’ll admit.

But in recovery, I dedicated myself to a mission.

I was going to go to the ends of the Earth to figure out who I was and what I was supposed to do with my life.

Which, unknowingly, meant throwing myself into the deepest levels of Hell in order to find it.

I had to process so much self-hate, insecurity, and irresponsibility. I had to wade through the wastes of victimhood, my unseen loathing and grudges toward other people, and stinging childhood experiences that made me hide my true self from the world around me.

…

The difficulty of such an experience is that you have to walk hand in hand with all of those emotions and experiences. You don’t just relive them, you have to dissect them(I highly suggest a therapist for expediting the process).

Which means, you have to find a way to return again from your insecurity and fear and doubt. You have to purge yourself of the sins you unjustly put on yourself and the ones that were justified.

You have to find leave behind that person. You have to realize that you’ve learned well enough to not commit the same crimes on yourself and others.

That is Dante’s transition into purgatory after first witnessing the nine levels of Hell. The shedding of unjust action and falsity and sin.

…

And there lies the difficulty of fear.

It’s why I’m afraid of fear itself.

There’s still a bodily attachment.

There’s still a narrative response that’s two-decades old: you’re not good enough for her/leadership/power/influence/business/respect.

It seems as if the body has an inability of keeping up with the mind. What pain and struggle we shed ourselves in our thoughts needs so much repetition to get the body to feel it is so.

It’s why we have to tell ourselves ten thousand times that “you’re worthy, you’re good, you’re limitless” before our body actually starts to acknowledge it and come into sync with our intellectual side of it.

…

That’s why it’s so easy to make excuses for what we must do to become who we want to be. We’re in a state of fear, a panic, not ready for steps. So we find a reason to avoid it.

It’s easy to rationalize our fear.

Pretty much always.

And we do it in one major fashion:

We let it get the best of us by rationalizing what we don’t have, that we think is necessary to have, in order to make a business decision, make a move on someone we like, commit to an event of task, stand on a stage, press publish, stand up for someone who can’t do it for themselves, or speak out on discrimination and hate.

Personally, my biggest ones are:

“I don’t own my own home.”

“I haven’t published enough.”

“I don’t have the right tools, resources, or capacity.”

“I haven’t got a perfect business plan or practice.”

“I’m not mentally strong enough, emotionally resilient enough, or disciplined enough.”

“I’m not romantic, charismatic, or funny enough.”

“I’m not tall enough or handsome enough or interesting enough.”

“I’m too eclectic, too weird, too chaotic, too destabilized.”

“I don’t have anything in common with these people anyway.”

“Pfff. They’re too common, artificial, superficial, blinded by the easy life anyway.”

“I’m too….uncommon.”

A lot of stuff that really…just makes you sound like a recluse or an asshole.

It’s all nonsense.

It’s all emotional irrationality that disguises itself as fact and self-wisdom.

…

The problem is, we alienate ourselves.

We find reason to slow down, theorize, and “plan” to avoid failure and doubt and being caught in a moment that makes us uncomfortable.

We self-paralyze.

By not making moves, we double-down on our polarizing narratives that make us feel “other”. And then we justify it by telling ourselves that we want to be different.

Not realizing that the more we focus on our differences, the more reason we justify not just our avoidance of the world and its opportunities, but the attachment to the same cycle that inevitably keeps us from ever getting what we want.

Fear is stagnant.

Stagnation is fear.

It is built in the seconds that we pause after our intuition and instinct to do something crazy, risky, or sacrificial.

And we keep ourselves ignorant to one very important skill:

Our insane power to pivot, adapt, or acclimate after a decision to act on something we fear in the moment.

We are so well-conditioned to survive in action.

And we end up losing little bits of ourselves every time we decide not to act.

…

The devil himself is in our hesitancy.

He shows up in the impulsive narrative of the mind. He lies to you about your body’s anxiety. He lies and says that you’re risking your life and status.

But it’s your job to beat him before the paralysis sets in.

Fear of all things is a healthy response. It’s doing it’s job. But the assumed outcomes are always a lie. Because even in failure, we survive.

And we learn.

…

Fear will never go away.

It’s a sufficient biological evolution that really fucks with us in a world where objective danger is so much less than it was. And so, it keeps us small in a new world where survival is now about what we can accomplish in imagination, expression, and innovation.

But if we can see fear for what it really is, and put it in the backseat where it belongs, we can become and live so much more.

Fear is the screaming, crying, tyrannical child that doesn’t get to drive or have control.

And that’s where it belongs.

So that you can get where you’ve promised yourself you were always meant to go.

…

Here’s to you and to me, Reader.

To making fear not worth fearing.

To doing more than not doing.

To making our lives what everyone of us wants them to be:

Deeply well-lived.

Truth and Love, Reader.

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