A Beautiful Thing Will Grow Out of This Very Hard Thing

Sometimes beautiful things live inside the very hardest of things.



Yesterday, for the first time in a very long while, I ventured outside alone to go to the corner store. I wanted to see if it was open so that I could buy something cheap and sweet, but the store was closed. It was only a short block I had to walk to get there, but I felt so exposed, so far from my nest of safety, that my collar bones ached with the tightness in my throat and chest.

I am sometimes afraid to leave my home.



This fear happens when I am shifting, when I am changing my patterns of thought or behaviour. I panic, and my panic turns inward, where I question all the good of which I am capable. I have spent a week sure that I cannot write or make or do valuable things, that my faultiness far outweighs my abilities.

This insecurity is usually followed by the hatred of my own appearance, and this week was no exception. I became convinced that my own appearance was so terrible, so below acceptable standards, that I did not want to be seen by strangers who did not already love me.

"I can't go out," I sometimes say. "Strangers will see my face, and I can't have that."



I came home from my harrowing trip to the corner store with that familiar burn of shame running up the back of my neck while I tried to catch my breath, and I immediately asked the Palinode to come for another, slightly longer walk with me. I knew that my well-being depended on killing this thing in the moment.

I know my mind. If I let leaving be so terrible that it scares me back, and then rest into my safe spot on the couch again, I will more deeply train a pathway in my brain that confirms the messages that Leaving Is Bad and Staying Is Good. I imagined myself in the future on a talk show saying "I don't know how it happened, but one day I just stopped leaving, and now it's been 17 years since I walked out my front door."



The Palinode and I walked to another drugstore further away, and as we chatted about things like whether grease is wet or dry¹ and what the actual elements of moisture are, my chest loosened. The stuck feeling in my throat eased up.

That pathway in my brain, one that could have so easily become a deeper groove, unkinked itself a little bit. I bought myself some more time with freedom.



I haven't said much about my depression, anxiety, or addiction issues over recent months. As much as I've written about them before and talked about them in front of audiences across two countries, I am afraid to write about them here.

I am afraid that no one will believe me anymore that shame can be used to see rather than punish yourself, that your courage is bigger than you know, and that fear is surmountable. I am afraid that I don't have what it takes to stay on this path I have fought so hard to find and bushwhack my way through. I am afraid that people will second-guess hiring me, thinking that I am not up to the job.

Part of my job on this earth, though, and I deeply hold this to be true, is to be very publicly human.

I do have the strength, though. We all do. This is a bones deep knowledge I can't shake.

I'm just experiencing retreat after battle, or, as Brené Brown calls it in I Thought It Was Just Me, a "vulnerability hangover". You shouldn't trust someone who hasn't lived their subject, and so I'm treating this phase of change as intensive study. I'm diving in.

In the end, Ghandi said it most succinctly²:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

This course I take repeatedly through anxiety, depression, and the hard work of sobriety is difficult and terrible at times, but the most beautiful parts of my whole life grow out of the soil it helps me to turn over.

Fear is gripping, but love and belief birth hope, growing capital-c Courage larger than the self.

And, so, a beautiful thing will grow out of this very hard thing, and you will not see me on a show in 17 years wondering why I never left my home again in all that time. This, I can promise you.

---

<sup>1. It turns out that grease is a non-Newtonian fluid that can be both wet and dry. Thanks goes to brainiac @jannymarie for the information. ↩

2. This paragraph is often paraphrased as "be the change you want to see in the world", which is an unverified misquote that Ghandi never actually said, because he didn't speak Bumper Sticker. ↩</sup>

We Are More Than the Stories of Our Fears

I have been living with a lot of fear lately. I know I gave a whole talk on self-doubt and how to move through it so you can be greater than you know, but I'm still a huge fraidy cat, because so much of life looms so large. Some of it looms large and ugly, but even the parts that loom large and glorious are scary. I know I'm not the only one who feels this.


photo credit: Palinode

I have a lot of good things going on right now. I'm going to be the closing keynote speaker at BlogWest 2013, I'm going to be a speaker at Mom 2.0 Summit, I'm collaborating with an artist on a book right now, I have this new Three Way Death Match podcast, I am working on the highly-important-to-me #365poems project, and my design and consultation work is keeping me happy, challenged, and fed. These are all things that go in the looming-large-and-glorious camp, and yet they still scare the bejeezus out of me some days.

Can I do all of this?
Do people's expectations of me match my actual skill set?
Can I do all of this?
What if I make/say/do things, and people don't like them?
Can I really do all of this?
Do I have the strength to handle as much rejection as I might be asking for?
Can I really, really do all of this?

So, I was sitting here running through the list of all the things I could possibly fail at over the next six months when I watched this video that Jen Lee shared, "The Scared is scared", and now you have to watch it, because I said so, and it's good for you:

I'm waiting. No, really. Watch it. It's beautiful, and it's going to make you think better thoughts.

Did you watch it? Good. Now we can talk about it, because it reminded me of a couple of incredibly important things, one being this:

"When the scared feeling comes into you, the Scared is scared of things you like."

So I paused the video and thought of things I liked: I like holding hands with the Palinode under the table when we're out with friends, crunching through frozen blueberries with my back teeth, spooning with Onion, hanging out with friends from all over the world on Skype, waking up from a sleep so heavy it feels like I've just returned from an epic journey, all the shades of blue-green my dining room wall turns as the daylight shifts, and cold butter on slightly burnt toast.

I actually started to feel a little better, and then I got to what is my favourite part of the video, the point when we find out what happens after the story of Asa Bear and Toby Mouse at the pool ends:

"So, what are Asa Bear and Toby Mouse going to do when the pool closes?"

"They have so much that they can do in the winter. There are stories about winter. There are stories about other things. I have heard they once even had a sleepover."

When I am living inside my fear, it is so easy to forget that all these other stories are also going to unfold. It is so easy to forget that all these other stories will become possible both inside of and after the ones that are already happening now. It feels like a revelation every time I remember this:

Bits of yourself speak to you from your past about what happened then, and the you of now speaks to those stories about how they sit in the context of all that has happened since, and you become a powder keg of stories informing stories.

Scared is scared of the things I like, and I am more than the story of my fear.

We are all more than the stories of our fears.

And, if/when one failure or two failures or a whole avalanche of failures happens, they are not the ends of any stories, not really, because there are always, always more stories, and they've already begun somewhere, even as I felt myself falling down a hole. I just didn't know it yet.

Nina Simone On Freedom and Fear

I'll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear!  – Nina Simone