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.

Big Change, Fear and Loss, and the Need to Let Go

test paint patches drying on our new condo's walls.

I had a dream last night that my cats were bored. I looked at them being bored, and I thought about how they could live for 20 boring years in my home, or how they could live for five brief but interesting years out in the world.

I spent the remainder of the dream weeping inconsolably for the horror of my actions, because safety to the point of boredom had robbed their one shot at living of most of its potential for meaning. There is little worse than that.

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A few nights before that, I dreamed of a giant, illustrated bumble bee. It had a large mouth filled with triangular, menacing teeth. Its mouth opened in the shape of an engulfing wishbone and scooped up an entire dog, which was barking at the bee. The dog didn't know that the bee could eat it, and it believed until it was swallowed whole that its barking meant something or would have some effect. It didn't.

The bee didn't hate the dog, or even want to scare the dog. The bee was just doing what the bee was made to do, which was to eat what was in front of it.

My dream kept juxtaposing my position as observer and my identity as self on top of the bee and the dog so that I became confused about whether I was the bee eating or the dog being eaten or the observer neglecting to step in and change the course of events. I felt powerful and annihilated and guilty.

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Taking out our first mortgage and being in this limbo space of not having moved yet but preparing to do so has me anxious. It has me feeling like I can't play anymore, like I have to take everything that much more seriously now that the walls that house me are mine.

In a lot of ways, this makes my life much more secure, but rather than that translating into a feeling of security, it's translating into a heavy feeling of loss and fear.

I am sure that this will pass. This is a natural reaction to change. We mourn what we will no longer have or experience, even if that experience was not ideal, and we fear what's coming, because it hasn't popped out from around the corner yet to show itself.

I think I need to take Maira Kalman's advice: go for a walk, empty myself out, and let wonderful things happen.



That walk will end with me buying paint for our new home and heading over to start the work of making it ours, and I am excited about putting ourselves into the space we live for the first time together. We are banishing Rental Apartment White forever!

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PS. My 40th birthday is on December 29th. I'm celebrating my birthday by raising $2,650 with Charity: Water to bring 40 people clean water for life, and we're already 24.5% there!

So, as a gift to me and to the world, let's make this happen.

25 Things I'm Afraid to Write About

1. Ethics, morality, and the law
2. Gender identity
3. The behaviour of bloggers and best practices
4. Politics
5. Femininity's hobbling impact on females
6. Sexuality
7. Marriage
8. The true number of books I've read over the last ten years
9. My own appearance
10. Race
11. Being a childless, gender variant, queer-identified woman in a straight marriage post-hysterectomy
12. Privilege
13. Parenting as the ultimate fulfillment
14. Religion
15. My true levels of anxiety and depression
16. Pacifism
17. My choice not to have children
18. Money
19. How much I dislike artificial nails with french manicures
20. Sobriety
21. My family
22. The actual lack of connection between spiritual growth and financial riches
23. Plastic surgery
24. The ethics around vegetarian/vegan diets
25. Love