Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

My Fear Factor is High, But I'm Working on It.

Not me and never will be…

Let’s talk about fear. I’ve always lived with an abundance of it. Growing up, I was petrified of someone breaking into our house, being kidnapped, things that went bump in the night. Nothing had happened in my earliest years to cause my baseline of fear, but it was always there, ready to jump out and say boo like all the bad things I imagined.

I think imagination is the genesis of it. I’ve always had an overactive interior life, spinning stories, scenarios and ideas like Charlotte and her web. Call it writer’s brain. I often say my mind goes places without me. When I was a child, it liked to travel to lots of scary places that I didn’t particularly want to go.

Hand in hand with my inherent fear factor was an aversion to risk and avoidance of the frightening unknown. Other than a homemade haunted house in my neighbor’s garage, I never set foot in one. Will not to this day.

Hear me out. A haunted house would be the most perfect setting for a psycho killer to commit murder. Think about it. People are already screaming in terror, there’s fake blood everywhere, actors pretending to be killing people, others playing dead, plenty of dark corners, and loud noises like banging and chainsaws buzzing (or so I’ve been told since I’ve never been in one). A murderer could easily go all Freddy Krueger on someone and be gone by the time the lights came up at the end of the night. See what I mean about my overactive imagination? (But also, I’m not wrong about this theory.)

Other things I avoid due to my personal doom dread: roller coasters, bungee jumping, horror movies, motorcycles, and riding subways at night. As a woman in this world, some fears are wholly warranted. We walk with our keys in hand, pay attention to our surroundings, carry mace or more serious weapons, avoid deserted parking lots, share our locations, avoid being alone on dark streets. But my fears go beyond the rational ones and into the realm of unlikely what ifs.

It’s like my brain can’t help going five steps ahead of a situation. I see the dryer’s lint filter we forgot to empty, and my mind goes straight to the house burning down. My daughter takes too long to text or call me back, and I worry she’s being held in a basement somewhere. (I never thought I’d say this, but I am so happy she lives in a place that has Waymo driverless cars. They eliminate my worry about her getting in an Uber driven by a serial killer. The worry of a Waymo malfunctioning and driving off a bridge is another story.)

I advise my NY-based son to always stand back from the subway platform edge. Too many stories about nut jobs randomly pushing someone onto the tracks. With my expert level of worry, it’s a wonder I even get out of bed.

Nowhere is my fear factor more pronounced than on planes though. I love to travel but hate to fly. The only time I can almost fully relax while defying the laws of gravity thousands of feet in the air is when drugs are involved. Narcotic induced napping is the only way to go.¹

Believe it or not, I am not normally an anxious person, and I actually function quite capably in the world. My fear does not typically interfere with my life. I am aware of my brain’s tendency to inflate the probability of disaster or death, and I am able to tamp it down and talk myself out of it when it happens.

Some of the scariest things, though, have nothing to do with death or dismemberment. For most of my life, vulnerability was my Kryptonite. The older I’ve gotten, though, the more I’ve been able to shed this fear like a butterfly cracking out of its chrysalis.

This very publication is proof since I regularly share the messy, maddening, and personal parts of myself in my writing. I put myself out there (wherever out there is) warts and all and have been rewarded with a deepened sense of self-acceptance and authenticity as well as connection with others who see themselves in my words and wonderings.

In my old-ish age, I’ve come to see that my fear of vulnerability coupled with a fear of failure often held me back. There were risks I didn’t take and things I didn’t do because I wasn’t sure if I could. Rather than risk and raise the possibility of failing, I chose to avoid or ignore. Nowhere is this more manifest than in my writing life.

I made my living as a writer for years, assembling words for the sake of selling or spotlighting something that wasn’t mine. As an ad agency copywriter and later a freelancer, I crafted ad campaigns, corporate communications, magazine articles, and other promotional materials for clients and companies. I enjoyed the work and got to flex my creative muscles as part of the job, but I never wrote anything personal or revealing about myself. That part of my writing life was abandoned like a boarded up building.

I did dip my toe into personal revelation in my other creative work as a choreographer. I sometimes explored themes and emotions that struck meaningful chords for me, but I could do so with a thin cloak of detachment since I was rarely the one performing these works. This choreographic vulnerability was a step removed from me with the buffer of other dancers’ performances and interpretations. There was also the backbone of music my choreography was built on that provided messaging and tone separate from myself.

With personal writing, though, it’s me and my words making their way from the page directly to my audience. No buffers, no scaffolding to hide behind.

After my mom died a few years ago, I was left in a puddle of almost-panic about the ever shrinking expanse of time I had left to do the things I wanted to do and make the meaning I wanted to make before it was my turn to exit stage left. This newfound urgency led to saying yes to things that scared me and finally committing to putting my unvarnished self on the page.

Exploring my pain, personal foibles, private musings and sometimes uncomfortable truths out loud and unfiltered for all to see was a fear I was finally ready to face. I didn’t have any idea how it would feel or what would happen when I started my Substack publication; I just knew that I finally felt brave enough to make the leap and worry about growing my wings after.

I surprised myself, and I flew.

This has been the greatest gift I’ve given myself. As the words have spilled out and accumulated, the rewards of risk taking have only multiplied. Leading with curiosity rather than staying hidden in the shadows of fear has broadened my world in wondrous ways.

One of the gifts of going for it with my writing is finding my voice. The older I get, the less I care what other people think and the more I accept that I will never be everyone’s cup of tea. The freedom in this is that I’ve never been more authentically me.

Personal writing has also been a great clarifier, often helping me figure out what I think about things as I go. Releasing my words into the world and actually gathering readers of my work has brought its own unexpected rewards, the biggest of which is connection.

There’s nothing more gratifying than hearing, “Me too,” or “You made me think” or “You made me laugh” in response to something I’ve written. Conversely, my writing has helped me discover other writers I never would have known, some who have become real life friends.

Facing my fears about writing personally and in a public format has shown me that I do have something to say and that what I say often resonates with others. It’s also made me realize that I have stories worth sharing which has led to my biggest leap yet.

I am writing a novel.

Putting that on the page is like saying it out loud and puts a tight little squeeze in my chest. It’s scary.

I have barely started, and I have no idea what I’m doing or where it will lead. I just know that the fear of regret at not trying outweighs the fear of doing it. So I’m saying yes to this big thing that scares me, and so far, it doesn’t feel like I’m headed into darkness or doom. In fact, I feel alive, awake, and open to possibility.

Dare I say, it makes me feel a bit brave. A fellow writer recently used braving as a stand-alone verb, and I told her I was going to steal it.² So I’m using it here: I am braving, and it feels good. Just do not expect to find me in a haunted house or dangling from a bungee cord. I’m afraid I gotta draw the line somewhere.

1. If you want to hear about how my fear once freaked out everyone else on a plane, read this.

Look! Up in the Air! It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a Woman Freaking Out!

2. Here’s the Nan Tepper piece I stole it from.

When the Weight Falls Away