I Feel Afraid

Like so many other emotions, I’ve suppressed my fear for the majority of my life. As I’m learning to accept my fear, I feel as if I’ve gained another sense. An incredibly useful one.

Fear has always been something I’ve been taught to ignore, to fight, to overcome. As a man in this culture, I’ve been taught that it is near the top of the list of emotions that I’m not allowed to feel, let alone express.

This is not to say that that I haven’t felt fear at all. It was just… different. Up till now I felt physical fear. Dancing, public speaking, and rock climbing were, and still are, things that scare me. Last year I made it a point to lean into that fear and learn to move with it. In spite of it.

I’ve noticed that I’ve, instead, been suppressing and sometimes fully numbing emotional fear. The fear of rejection, the fear of being misunderstood, the fear of feeling vulnerable, of being hurt.

I’ve had some difficult experiences in the last couple months. That’s a story for another day, but in the end, these events gave me the opportunity to break out of my numbness and to learn to feel and accept my fears.

This process was (and still is) incredibly intense, difficult, and scary. It’s hard to know how to handle this kind of fear when I’ve spent my whole life convincing myself that I wasn’t afraid. When I’ve spent my whole life seeing fear as an enemy to be avoided, ignored, or defeated at all costs.

I’ve spent several years dedicated to the process of self-acceptance and healing. I believe all that work of leaning into fear I did last year was foundational to what I’m doing now. Because of all that practice, I’m able to feel my fear without being overwhelmed by it.

I have spent the last two months allowing myself to feel and acknowledge more fear than any time in my life. I’ve realized that I fear a lot of things. Little things, big things, rational things, irrational things. It’s been incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s been more than worth it. I feel as if I’ve gained a kind of superpower.

I feel as if I have much more insight into people than I ever have. People I would have tried to be friends with or sought out a relationship with. I see things that I would have ignored or justified before.

I have a habit of over-sharing in a bid for connection and acceptance. I used to want to be close friends with everyone. I didn’t have any boundaries. I didn’t give any thought to whether or not having these people in my life would be good for me. I just felt as if I needed to impress them in some way. As if I needed to work for their approval.

Now, before I share, I sometimes feel afraid. When I listen to that fear to see what it has to say, I find that it can sense things about people and situations that I didn’t initially consciously perceive. The fear allows me to snap out of the narrative that I had been creating, take a step back, and reevaluate things.

I’m finding that potential friendships and other relationships that I would have normally done anything to have in my life aren’t what they seemed to be on the surface. They are familiar and, therefore, feel comfortable, but they would ultimately not be good for me. This allows me to set boundaries and more realistic expectations for people in my life.

Fear is not my enemy. It is not something to fight or to overcome. It is a signal. It is a sense of danger. That danger is sometimes real, sometimes it’s not. I believe courage is the ability to feel that fear, listen to what it’s saying, use it to make a more informed decision and to take action in the direction of personal growth.

It is easy for me to walk along the edge of a cliff if I am blindfolded and don’t sense the danger. I’ve lived much of my life with that blindfold on. Sometimes I would walk along that edge while people commented on how brave I was. The truth is, I wasn’t.

I’ve removed my blindfold, I see a lot that I never have before. I’m learning to distinguish real danger from imaginary. I’m learning to work with my fear. I’m learning to welcome it into my life. I am thankful for it. I want to live with courage and without fear, it’s impossible to be courageous.