What are you afraid of, anyway?

Probably lots of things. That's okay.

Hey, Runners!

I have traditionally just ignored my fears. When they creep up, I pretend they’re not there and go about my business, la la la I can’t see you, right there, filing your nails while telling me that I’m a talentless hack.

Except that was bullshit.

I could always see them, and feel them, and a lot of the time, I believed them.

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Fears are real. They’re not necessarily right.

A few years ago, for my podcast Big Strong Yes, we read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, and it changed my life.

I have always been riddled with anxiety about everything. From the small things, like traffic making me late to work, to the big ones, like will the doctors be able to get my asthmatic kid breathing again, I have worried and fretted and feared like nobody’s business. Part of me believed that if I worried about something first, it wouldn’t happen, and because most of the things we worry about don’t actually happen, it became a self-validating dysfunction.

Eventually, the worst thing that would ever happen to me in my adult life happened. My life and my business were destroyed in one foul moment. And I realized that I had spent so much time worrying about things that never happened, that I’d exhausted myself by the time the big disaster finally did happen to me.