fear led

I turned 31 last month. 31 years around the sun.

I feel a little bit like I missed my 30th year, with this pandemic and all, but I guess that is true for everyone in a way, ‘the lost year’ as a colleague referred to it the other day.

I have been thinking about fear on and off for a while now, and have just come home from a walk with a friend, I have landed here in my armchair with thoughts in my finger-tips. We talked about fear while we walked, the idea of being led by fear or being led by love, how faced with the things that fill us with fear, it often makes us run away.

Almost two years ago, I was planning the return back to England full time. This new adventure of returning. I was also full of nerves of what on earth was next. I was sitting on a life I was comfortable in, that had shaped and grown me through my 20s, it had made me the person I was, and I was saying goodbye to it all. Yet I had deciding to pack up my things into 2 suitcases and a bunch of boxes, plus an armchair and coffee table, and fly home.

But that wasn’t want filled me with fear.

What filled me with fear was what the new people I would meet would think of me, whether I was really ready to try and actually date and be vulnerable, and whether I would step into all the things I wanted to do but hadn’t. All the things I had promised myself I wasn’t’ doing because I was living this life in Romania that had stopped me from doing them.

Plot spoiler, it wasn’t Romania that was stopping me, it was fear. Fear of being laughed at because I wasn’t good enough, fear of failing, fear of not being enough, and fear of not being liked, fear of not being perfect.

I look back and can map out moments from the age of 5 where fear led my decisions and led my responses to situations.

I remember two distinct moments when my fear of people, of failure, of not being good enough made me quit things I had begged by parents for. Singing lessons and horse riding. Moments of not being perfect while in those lessons literally made me run away. In both cases it wasn’t that I had stopped loving horse or singing, I still love both. But teenage me was so full of fear of being ‘found out’, of failing and starting again, that I just stopped.

For animals fear is this instinct that protects them, that allows them to know when they should hide, or run or camouflage themselves into the tree, it is a protection. But humans, or at least I, seem to have that instinct mixed up. I attach it to things that make me stop doing what brings me life, or what could be fun or joyful.

Here I am writing this out, knowing that I have never fully commit to my writing, or my photography, for fear of failure. So sure it will all be horrible and go wrong, and slightly fearful of what happens if it succeeds. I don’t share it, I don’t let people know I do it. I leave it like a small secret of mine, for someone to accidentally find. Because of fear. Of the unknown.

So there it is.

This realisation that has crept up on me that for the past 31 years I have primarily been led by fear and not love. Fear of failing and of being laughed at seem to be my Achilles heal. As I talked and walked with my friend, I realised that I really don’t want to live that way. That I want to choose to live a life led by love.

I like this quote by Brene Brown “We’re all afraid. We just have to get to the point where we understand it doesn’t mean that we can’t also be brave.”

I would rather be brave and choose the things I love, that to miss out on it all and be led by fear.

So here’s to 31 and a year of stepping into being brave and uncoupling myself from the fear of failing.

R/