The Fear Factory

So, I have been thinking a lot about fear lately. This post: FEAR GOGGLES is pretty good. Read it if you want.  It made me think about all the different sorts of fears we all face.  Well really, to be honest, my own fears.

Within that post are some great examples of  things we as humans fear:

The fear of being alone, of being abandoned, of being cheated on, of being harmed, betrayed or used.
Alright, let me own that. Some of those are things I fear. So what drives them? What fuels them? Where do they begin? I mean, mine can basically be boiled down to two separate, but related fears-fear of disappointing others coupled with that intense fear of rejection I have written about many times before in posts like Pulse...

Reading through back posts, it's obvious that this fear topic pops into my mind often.  I try to both stay aware of it, as well as push myself beyond my warm and cozy comfort zone as much as possible.  Which means being aware of when I am avoiding things for the simple fact that I have some fear surrounding it... In the last year I began conquering one of those fears by starting to go places solo, which may seem like no big deal to many of you, but for the girl who would NEVER so much as THINK of rolling up to a party (even if it were a party of my closest friends), let alone a bar, or far scarier, a restaurant without some sort of wing man or posse as a buffer, I had this intense fear of being alone, with myself. So, this has been a gigantic step.  I think it's interesting that it took almost four years of singledom to get to this point of comfort with myself amongst the outside world. And I won't lie, when I started challenging myself in this way, it was fucking scary, but now, it seems pretty second nature.

I think some fears are much more predominant in our lives today because there are so many ways to AVOID facing those fears.  For instance: it was a hurdle to start doing shit on my own, but the bigger hurdle came when I challenged myself to do it without having my face buried in my phone as a crutch (yes, there's ALWAYS another layer). With the litany of social networking sites and the like around the web, it is easier than ever to have my best face forward (or buried) in all sorts of arenas... as I have mentioned before, this is not necessarily a bad thing; I do not believe it is possible or plausible to let every single person know every single side of us. I mean come on, that's TMI with a capital everything.  Where it does become problematic though is when all of our authenticity is lost in that process AND the very act of doing so leads us further away from any sort of self evident truths. 

A friend shared this post the other day, called 7 Reasons Why You Will Never Do Anything Amazing In Life and as I sat at my computer, reading through the list, I was struck by how many of those things (albeit unintentionally) I am guilty of.  That first reason, because you haven't failed enough, struck the biggest chord with me in respect to all this best face forward shit.  A few years back, I wrote about being ready to fail a lot in the post Shutter Speed. I went back and re-read that post and thought, huh. It all still applies, and.... I am STILL doing my best to avoid failure, which is at once a frustrating and refreshing awareness.  It's frustrating because confronting awarenesses over and over IS fucking frustrating.  It's fucking tough to once again gnaw on that old shoe-leathered-humble-pie.  But, at the same time, I am grateful to make the connection (again) and begin (again) to work through the awareness, discovering new (as well as forgotten) ways to apply it in my life.

So, with my own fears, I find there are generally two paths that I take, one is the above mentioned old familiar path of avoidance.  The other, is to keep them locked up in the dark, slyly thinking that if I don't let them out, no one else will notice.  I visit them often, I feed them an organic, high fucking protein diet and I allow them to exercise daily, in the back corners of my mind.  And, over time, they grow.  They become fit and far too big for that closet I originally housed them in. And at some point, they break free. 

And there I am, standing in front of the mangled closet door, completely flabbergasted as to how my fears could have so easily escaped. And all of the sudden, panic sets it. H-O-L-Y F-U-C-K, HOLY FUCK, HOLY FUCK! The tidal wave of anxiety hits me. The autonomic fight or flight response sets in. And, I begin searching desperately for those ripped, gnarly, fears.  I am pissed and hyper focused on finding those fears and re-caging them. But my focus is misguided.  Because the point, all along, has not been to cage my fears. The point is to either let that shit out or step into the cage and fucking fight it out.

...So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to future attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. ~ Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

That's a quote from a quote in How to Be Afraid & Do It Anyway, which helped me really bring some of my fear shit full circle.   I am tired of continuing to nail the fucking closet door shut for fear of my fears getting out.  I am good with having fears. I am not good with letting them rule me. So, as the chick so brilliantly suggested, it's time to introduce those fears to the light of day. Perhaps the most striking quote from the above post is this:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
I think I have come to the realization that all of my fears... in whatever skewed form they take on in a particular moment are less about my own perceived inadequacies and more about claiming my own power.  Sure, I know that I have the power to change my life, or my perceptions or my thoughts, but I don't know that I have ever allowed myself to truly and completely let the depth of that sink in.  Usually, I think of this in terms of 'not giving my power away' now I am starting to see that it's about truly owning that power.
What would happen if instead, I chose to embody it?  What if instead of worrying about what others think, or avoiding things for fear of failure, I were to focus completely on what I think, and how I can manifest things in my life?  Perhaps then, I can make some real progress.  Pretty sure that the lack of commitment to myself is what feeds the fears.  Devoting so much focus to keeping those fears in their cage (or chasing them back into the cage) allows me to temporarily 'forget' these awarenesses...ya know, like the awareness that avoidance is a detour, not a solution.  Sometimes things are so damned simple, it's the over thinking that gets me. Every. Fucking. Time. 

I let my mind run wild with fears and endless inner chatter.  As a result, I lose focus and I lose that cage fight with my fears. When it comes down to it, I can choose to let my fears rule me or I can choose to quiet my mind and center myself.  So simple... yet so very easy to forget, if I allow myself to.