The Strength of Fear

Recently we had a friend stay with us who is going through a rough patch - namely, housing issues, "What am I doing with my life?" issues, and she also as of Wednesday had a big car wreck that left her truck totalled and her head nicely stapled together by the fine folks at Evergreen Hospital. Now, this woman is not living a high life by any means - she's a caregiver making small cash for a bedridden person, and she owns a menagerie of dogs which makes it difficult for her to find decent housing. So this accident left her in the dust in many ways - no car, little money for vet bills (half of said menagerie was riding shotgun with her at the time of the accident), and in a great deal of pain. However, in the course of her recuperation with us, we began talking about a good deal of things - marriage, relationships, what we wanted out of life. And the one thing that stuck with me is just how old we all can get while still not addressing these issues.

You can spend decades avoiding the strengths of your desires in this world. Grow to a ripe old age treating what drives your soul as if it were a silly prank played on you while the real world ran the show. What keeps us from confronting our dreams and caring for them? We raise children, pets, plants with such adoring compassion, but for ourselves it's as if we're avoiding a veering drunk barreling down on us late at night. As if our passions in this world were bigger than we were, bullying us somehow instead of reminding us of our vitality.

Why is it that simply saying "I am this." is so daunting? I used to feel abject fear in front of people I knew were viable artists - writers, actors, painters. Told myself numerous times that they were dangerous or too clever or even subversive (which of course, they all were and so am I). But when I began taking the stage for myself, I realized just the opposite - that these people were my compatriots and equals and deepest friends. Rounding off my edges made me invisible to myself, and those who knew I had more to offer the world left me behind, having given up on encouraging me to be a bigger person.

As I drove back down south from our friend's house after she had mended, I told myself more strongly than ever that I wasn't going to flinch anymore. Your life is the total effect of your own power and choice to assume greatness. If you allow the world to decide your days, it will decide much more than that and leave you nervous and shivering inside your own soul. The reality is that the thing you most fear will not manifest itself the way you think it will - we build our anxieties into such frightful towers and then lock ourselves inside.

Your fears can drive you into a sickly inertia that will destroy you. Taken in the right light, what you fear is just a sudden road sign telling you to take action in your life, open yourself up and choose to confront reality as it is. We need to either step into the light or shuffle along in the dust of our own darkness.

But the real point is that no one else cares as much as you do about what you're doing in life.. Don't abrogate your life to others - once done you'll find yourself living as a convenient tool someone else is using to get what they need.

Saying "I don't know what I want " is no different than saying " I don't know who I am." We all wait for others to make our decisions for us, to take our responsbilities away and leave us enough room to feel independent of sudden, simple change.