I Don’t Want To Hear About “Growing From Your Fear”
Feel the fear and do it anyway — we all heard that. Self-improvement culture reinforces this a lot.
“If you are afraid, that means you are growing.”
“Everything you want is on the other side of the discomfort.”
“Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”
And so on. We find this notion throughout self-help content so often, that eventually we can’t help but believe it:
FEAR = GROWTH
Because human brain has a tendency to oversimplify concepts, the above equation — in this exact simple form — became an integral part of my belief system. Consequently, feeling the fear seemed to be something noble to me. In a strange way, fear reassured me that I was doing everything in my power to expand myself.
Today I say: screw this kind of vision of “growth”. And screw the notion that I have to “grow” in each and every moment of my life.
Since a few weeks, I am coming to appreciate the value of comfort. Actually, I wrote an article about growing and thriving inside the comfort zone a year ago — but it is only these days that the true meaning of this hits me.
Why? Because recently I have experienced the most intense and long-lasting fear of my life. It…
