Overcoming Phobias and Insecurities Has Felt Empowering and Liberating

I don’t cook a lot, but I promised my wife I would try to cook at least once a week. Last month, I tried to cook a baked fish recipe. It was actually pretty easy — I needed to coat the fish in a mix of bread crumbs, mayo, and mustard, then put it in the oven for a couple of minutes.

I followed the ingredients to a tee, but made one critical mistake — instead of measuring exactly how much salt and pepper I needed with measuring spoons, I did what literally every other cook I’ve seen do: I estimated and eyeballed how much salt and pepper the fish needed. I coated the fish in salt, listening to my gut on where to stop instead of using a measuring spoon.

As you can imagine, the fish was incredibly salty, to the point where it was almost inedible. Every other part of the fish turned out fine, but I had to eat it with rice so the salt could spread around. My wife could not eat it because it was way too salty for her, and when I told her what I did, she said people I’ve seen cook, including her and my parents, are experienced and have cooked hundreds if not thousands of meals. They can just eyeball how much salt a particular dish needs, but until I became more experienced, I needed to follow the explicit directions of the recipe.

It was a beginner’s hiccup, but I have been trying to cook more often instead of relying on frozen foods, my wife’s cooking, really simple dishes of pasta and meat sauce or eggs. It is an area of my life where I’m a beginner but getting better — I just made soup as well from a chicken soup recipe and it tasted pretty good. I also grilled steak for the first time recently too, and got pretty good feedback on it. I am trying to make it more of a routine and build my capacity. For the most part, I realize cooking is largely pretty easy if you have the ingredients and the recipe — you just follow the directions, and if you don’t know how to do something, YouTube is always available.

I do wish I cooked more when I was younger, as it’s an obvious adult skill that I have not mastered or come close to mastering yet. I regret to admit that when I was young, my mom usually cooked and went as far as to ban me from being in the kitchen when I was really young, worrying I would either burn myself, cut myself, or burn down the kitchen. I had a reputation for being clumsy and careless as a kid.

I would adopt that fear too, but I now know how foolish this fear is. I also grew up in a pretty patriarchal culture where men didn’t usually cook, so that didn’t help either. It’s not like I never tried cooking when I was younger, only that the dishes were startling simple, and that I gave up easily when I didn’t have the ingredients of a recipe or didn’t know how what terms like “saute” meant or when I didn’t know how to dice vegetables. I also that I would undercook meat and give people salmonella, that I would simply cook food that tasted terrible as a host.

So, for this reason, cooking has been a bigger mental block and barrier. I didn’t fear it, but the older I got without really knowing how to cook, the more embarrassed I got. I would help my wife with cooking when we had guests, but in terms of cooking for the two of us, I would fall back on just not having enough time and being too busy.

Apparently, there is a term for an extreme fear of cooking called mageirocophobia. According to the Cleveland Clinic, mageirocophobia is severe anxiety around preparing food or cooking, to the point where a person can experience panic attacks. I would not say I have mageirocophobia, but I did have deep fears and insecurities that I’m trying to overcome now.

Now, I am trying to cook at least once a week, and although I am nowhere near proficient yet, the chicken soup, steak, and baked fish are a start.

I am 27 years old and a grown ass man. In my career as a special education teacher and as a law student at night, I can write pages and pages of legal arguments, legal documents, individualized educational plans at breakneck speed. I can write recreationally too for an audience with some success. As a runner, I can run 22 miles in the morning and then go about my day like nothing happened — it’s just routine.

These activities that seem to be a big deal for most people are a very small deal to me, yet something as simple as making a meal for myself and my wife once a week and learning to cook gave me more insecurity and embarrassment than running a marathon, taking a three hour law school exam, or running a high stakes IEP meeting with advocates and lawyers.

It’s not like learning to cook is a bigger deal than all of my career or academic accomplishments, but it does feel like a breakthrough for me. There is nothing I love more than turning an area of incompetence into an area of mediocrity, and then an area of mediocrity into an area of competence.

Another simple task that gave me a similar, but lesser form of insecurity was mowing the lawn. For the past year and a half of homeowning, we did not have a lawnmower since it was a little out of the budget. We not only needed a lawnmower, but a shed to store it in. I tried to use a grass trimmer to mow the whole lawn and stop it from getting out of control, but that was inadequate to mow the whole lawn. Fortunately, my neighbor mowed our lawn and we entered an informal arrangement for me to pay him.

I could always fall back on these budgetary restrictions and, again, not really having that much time, as a reason why I didn’t mow the lawn. But this year, I finally invested in a lawnmower and a shed. It was not cheap, but it is cheaper long term, of course, than paying my neighbor every couple of weeks.

Again, I am 27 years old and a grown ass man, and as a new homeowner, this is a skill I was going to need sooner or later. I did have some trepidation and fear when I was younger about mowing the lawn — there were old wives’ tales of people who got their foot cut off and amputated because they got them caught up in the lawnmower.

When I started mowing the lawn, there were some hiccups that seemed rather obvious to your average layperson or in hindsight. I did not know I needed to clear out objects like stones or branches from the blades of the lawnmower. I did not know how to mow the lawn on a hill, so I tried mowing downhill and side to side before I found out I was supposed to go uphill.

However, like cooking, I have learned through trial and error and watching YouTube videos. Learning how to mow the lawn has meant a lot more than the technical skill of learning how to mow the lawn. It has helped me become more confident and self-sufficient. It has kept me on my toes and be less reliant on others.

According to Dennis Buttimer, a cancer wellness coach at Piedmont Physicians at Inman Park, learning new skills has mind-body benefits of improving confidence, discovering gifts within yourself, and giving motivation. A new skill helps us beat boredom, stay healthy, and flexible, and boost happiness. These are often breakthroughs where not only do we better ourselves, but reshape our identities.

The best new skills to learn, in my experience, are the ones that have some type of internal fear or insecurity attached to them. They may be skills we have been told we would never have due to stereotypes or societal messaging. They can also be skills we personally have phobias towards, for whatever reason.

To overcome phobias, the Cleveland Clinic recommends exposure therapy, which is gradual exposure to something you fear and learning healthier coping mechanisms.

While I have recently taken up cooking and lawnmowing as new skills, my deepest insecurity when I was younger revolved around water — I couldn’t swim. I grew up in New York, where it seemed like everyone knew how to swim. My brother and my father were excellent swimmers. I had an episode of near drowning at six at a water park and had a bit of a fear and phobia since.

As a kid, like many, what I feared most was being left out and embarrassed, and being an outcast. Not being able to swim made me incredibly embarrassed numerous times. I would go out too far in the water to not be left out and hide the fact that I couldn’t swim on a beach. In the pool, I would hug the walls obsessively, thinking moving more than a foot away would cause me to die. One time, I panicked once the tide rose and my feet couldn’t touch the ground. Two strangers came to lift me to an area where I could stand.

“Your mom never taught you how to swim?” my friend’s mom asked me.

After this point in elementary school, I did everything I possibly could to avoid situations involving the pool and the beach.

Then, there was a situation where I couldn’t avoid the pool any longer: high school gym class. We had a whole unit where we had to swim, and without a doctor’s note, I could not opt out of it lest I fail gym. I never told the teacher I could not swim, but on the first day of the unit, everyone could tell.

I dreaded going to gym class every day of that unit, but I thought about the alternative and realized I had no other choice. I could cut class and then get a phone call home, and then be chewed out by my parents. I could sit on the sidelines and not participate, then have everyone wonder why I didn’t participate. And how would I live with myself if I did that, if I ran away and avoided my deepest fear instead of confronting it?

Fast forward three months, and I did not become an Olympian-level swimmer. But I did learn to swim by sheer virtue of having to go into the pool every other day and struggle. I was the last person to finish the 15 lap swim test of a 25 yard pool, using a very slow elementary backstroke the whole time. Throughout most of that unit, I would be among the four or five students who didn’t swim into the deep end. It gave me some consolation to know that I was not alone and there were others who couldn’t swim either. But I figured I would need to learn to swim at some point. The fact that I was able to finish the test at all was very impressive to my classmates, who saw me struggle to swim all quarter long.

Today, I can tread water, float, doggie paddle, freestyle above the water and do my customary elementary backstroke. I am still not a great swimmer compared to most people, but I went from someone who couldn’t swim to someone who could, even if I could not do it well.

For me, it was a huge deal — it was beyond learning a basic survival skill. I overcame a huge mental block and phobia. Drowning in front of all my friends was, essentially, my biggest fear. I would have nightmares about drowning and thought of it as the worst and most painful way to die. I would think of my lack of swimming ability as the biggest barrier behind joining the military — I feared the swim test much more than I feared the possibility of being in Afghanistan or Iraq.

And I realized the two times I almost drowned just seemed a lot worse than they actually were. I was not going to logically drown — the amount of time I spent underwater in both cases was less than 10 seconds. But my panic in those situations most definitely made them a lot worse. I would start flailing around, making myself sink even more. I would start swallowing water because of my fear of getting my face into the water and not being able to breathe. Because of my panic and aquaphobia, I would be more likely to drown to death.

So passing a high school swim test and now being able to doggie paddle and ride waves at the beach are a huge deal to me. They not only mean I overcame my deepest fear, but that I redefined myself as a person. When my wife and I were in Jamaica, we went to Ocho Rios, a popular tourist destination with supervised cliffdiving. We of course wore lifejackets, but I dove off a 30-feet-high cliff multiple times, which would have been unimaginable to me at 12. Today, I would be lying if I still didn’t have an elevated emotional response every time I’m far out on the beach or in the deep end of the pool, but swimming is no longer a phobia.

Some people are scared of spiders and insects. Others are scared of heights or claustrophobic. Some people I know are scared of dogs and other animals. I see co-workers, my wife, and friends freak out when they see a spider and I wonder — what’s the big deal? I then go kill the spider, but I realize how they feel about spiders is how I felt about swimming.

Of all my life accomplishments, including getting into law school on scholarship, excelling in law school, qualifying for the Boston Marathon four times, running a marathon at 6:05 mile pace, and teaching special education in inner city schools for five years, none gave me as much confidence and self-belief as overcoming my fear of swimming.

Today, learning how to cook is a smaller version of that — it’s not about just learning the skill, but overcoming a fear. It’s about doing what I previously thought was impossible. There has been nothing more personally inspiring or liberating.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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