Conversations with My Fears
Do you know that all the posts you have read until now have come from the most fearful person you could ever meet? Yes, I am that person. At different points in time, my fears took hold of me and I didn't have the energy to fight back. I succumbed to them.
The biggest fear that holds me up most of the time is the fear of loss.
I remember during my childhood, I lost a jewellery piece (anklet). I never wore anything precious after that as I always feared that I would lose it. And maybe this is the reason that I never became fond of jewellery. The next loss that I remember is losing the handbag that was gifted to me by my dear friends. More than losing the money, I felt that I lost something that constantly served as a reminder of my friends' love when I was miles apart from them. Now, you will hardly see me with a handbag and if there would be one then it would be not be anything more than a small sling crossbody bag that I could keep close to myself. As I grew, this fear of loss did get transformed from losing stuff to losing people.
And just like any other human being, I tried creating a safety net to protect myself from my fears taking hold of me in the future. I tried making this safety net strong by eliminating uncertainty from my life, taking control of things rather than depending on others, restricting expressing my feelings, avoiding saying NO to people, disconnecting with everyone, keeping money and relationships separately, securing myself financially, and a hundred other things. The more elements I added to this safety net, the more I stopped addressing my fears. They proved to be that sweet escape for that moment when my fear of losing something/someone was higher than my capabilities to manage that fear.
In the past few years, I have made a conscious effort to understand and connect with myself. While most of the questions were about, 'Who am I really?', but I also deep-dived to understand what do I fear. I am purposely trying to know them. A few of my fears have a rationale behind them in terms of past events. Some are just irrational fears coming from sources that I am not aware of, and some seemed to be borrowed from instances happening in the lives of people I am closely associated with. I also found that fears protect me in a way. But this happens only when I try to understand the rationale behind it and not just let them take over me. Now anytime I feel fearful about anything, I try having a conversation with it. I ask it, "Tell me the worst you can do to me". And then I try making myself comfortable with that worst stage or finding a way out to not arrive at that worst stage which occurs quite seldom in reality. But my mind develops the capability to handle that stage even if it comes.
I am talking this out because lately, I felt that I succumbed to my biggest fear again. I failed until yesterday, I talked with it this morning during my walk, and I am trying to slowly make myself accept that worst stage. In the meantime, I will try to keep showing up. And I hope you will too.
What am I up to? I tried working on an eLearning project in the Korean language. I was fearful to take it, but then I realized that I can’t learn without failing. I am thankful to the team who helped me in understanding this language even without understanding it.
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