I am starting to realise that fear has been the single most limiting habit I've ever formed, and the oldest. In fact it's the root of all my habits, and maybe every regrettable thing I have done.
I published My Depression Is Not An Illness on LinkedIn for a number of reasons, the one that was most important to me though was that I had to prove to myself that I had some courage, that I wasn't nearly as much as a coward as I had told myself I was.
As I lay in bed afterwards I felt my hear thumping in my chest, I was fidgety, scared and sleep seemed impossible. I spent those quiet hours alone with that fear and with not much else to do except resist the urge to delete the post or scream I just kind of “observed” my emotions.
And I began to play with them.
I imagined the worst outcome possible from what I'd written and felt my heart start to race, I stopped thinking about that and forced myself to breath slowly for a while and felt the rate slacken. I imagined it would somehow make me famous or successful and felt myself get excited.
I kept doing this, making it worse then making it better, making myself scared, making myself happy, making myself excited, watching how I was responding in myself to what I was thinking.
I thought I was just killing some time and proving something to myself, but I was actually learning something. Something that (now that I understand it) people have been saying for years, actually thousands of years.
I began to realise that fear is a bully. And like all bullies it's primary power is in the bluff, in the threat. Most of the time bullies don't need to physically hurt you to get at you, their power and their objective is to make you afraid. Afraid of what they COULD do if you don't give in to them.
But unlike many of the bullies of real life the emotion inside had nothing to back it up. Fear is all bluff, it couldn't hurt me, it couldn't do anything really except make my heart race and my scalp prickle... but so what? Is that all I was scared of? A racing heart, sweaty skin?
Fear is full of shit, it talks a big game, as if it can kill me, as if, if I don't do what it's telling me to do, the worst thing in the world is going to happen, but when I just bore it the threat was empty, and the thing I was scared of wasn't nearly as tough as I thought it was.
Remember the Wizard of Oz? When Dorothy lifts the curtain and The Wizard just turns out to be this little old guy with no power? That's what fear is, a frightened little man who's only as powerful as I believe him to be.
When I stopped surrendering to Fear I discovered that I had all this energy trying to burst out of me, without the fear of fear, my racing heart wasn't a warning or a threat any more it was an engine, a huge engine, inside me, thumping with power. So much power. Power that I could channel into what ever I wanted.
So I channel it into life, and I keep on writing.
