Do It Scared

There is much in our lives that can lead to feelings of fear. When we are children it feels much easier because they are the monsters under our bed and in our closet that mom or dad can make go away simply by checking. When we are adults, these fears become much more real. 

For what feels like forever, I have been living in fear. 

Fear of failing, fear of not being enough, fear of the unknown. There is seldom a time when I would sit with these feelings and allow myself to just, I don’t know, feel them. So, for the past week I did just that… here is what I learned:

Fear is what controls a lot of us. It is the thing that leads us to be stuck in places that we don’t want to be. Fear of letting someone down is something that has been guilting me into staying in many different spaces that I have occupied and I am really working on getting over that. The things that I am finding to be hard in doing that are 1) I do not have a therapist to help me work through these issues, and 2) I am more alone than I have been in a very long time. Which leads me to begin:

The fear of being alone is something that I have been struggling with since I was a child. There were nights that I would wake up and beg my mom to stay home from work so I wasn’t alone. As I got older, things got darker, and being alone often led to me doing stupid things that we don’t have time to unpack. But now that I am forced to be alone, I am finding that yes, there are moments when I wish I wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean that I am abandoned. 

The fear of abandonment stems from an absent family; or at least it does for me. I have this deep rooted fear that everyone I love only loves me when it is convenient for them, and that there is going to be a time when it is no longer convenient and they will leave. While this is irrational and a bit crazy, this is something that I have genuinely felt in the past and still struggle to overcome now. 

Fear of not being enough. Lord, could I tell you about this! I remember, about a year ago now, when I heard someone talking to my mom at my undergraduate commencement ceremony about all my cords and stoles. She stated that she doesn’t think there are many students that could do all that at once, and I finally felt validated. I am extrinsically motivated. I want to be able to prove that I am worth something, even if it is just someone telling me that I have done well on a project… because for the longest time, I never heard that, and I think that is what drives me to be successful. I want to be good enough. I NEED to be good enough… I still don’t have a solution for this one. 

I think that this is also where my fear of failure comes from. I want so badly to be accepted and to be part of something great, or to create something great, that I force myself to be afraid of failing. This is a conversation that I often had with my students: you don’t have to work at 100% all the time. You may be student-leaders, but you are students before leaders, and people before students. I know that this statement may be lost on those that have not been students for a long time, but remembering that failure is what makes us human is SO important. 

Finally, there is my fear of the unknown. I am always wanting to know everything that I can before making a decision. Where is this place that I am going, who is going to be there, for how long will we be there, what is the parking situation?... All jokes aside, not knowing is sometimes the best thing that can happen. When I took the leap to go to grad school, I had no idea what I was getting into. I knew no one, had never been to Indiana, and due to COVID the day of Interview Day, I had never even been to Ball State. But I did it.

I guess what I am trying to say is that there is always going to be a little bit of fear that we feel is holding us back, keeping us in our place, closing the door to our comfort zone. If there are things that I have learned about myself in the past year they are that I can do hard things, and I can do them scared. 

Here is my advice: do it.

Even if you have to do it scared.