Doing It Anyway
Life at its sweetest is like the summer vacations of your youth. Beholden to nothing and nobody save your own ambition, you wake with a belly full of dreams and a mind to make them happen. You are bright-eyed. You are bushy-tailed. You are jacked up on Fruit Loops and unfiltered optimism.
Life is good, baby.
Of course, there is always one potential glitch in your matrix: Fear, the snotty-nosed little sister to your otherwise perfect day.
She’s shrill. Unrelenting. A grade-A pain in your ass. And without fail, the instant you set to strike out for whatever adventures the day might hold, Mother Nature will call out from some back recess of your metaphorical home and insist that sister dearest tag along.
Hel-loooooohhh nightmare.
Now on some days, you might evade this obligation entirely. You bolt before sister Fear can catch you, your heartbeats marking a rapid pace as you fly across the threshold and out into a world just waiting to be discovered.
On those days, life is pure bliss. On those days, you scale fences, race rooftops, and rule neighbourhoods. On those days, you face every challenge and tackle every risk. For on those days, the possibilities are boundless and your confidence unshakable as you fearlessly bust open the horizons of your world, stretching, growing, learning, and all the while coming into a truer, deeper you.
On other days, you might adopt a different tact. Assuming your sweetest smile, you turn back and take wee sister Fear by the hand, leading her out the front door, down the driveway — and promptly tie her to a tree once a safe distance from home, racing off to the bellowed soundtrack of promised parental retribution. Or perhaps you let her tag along, but expertly tune out her frequency, allowing all suggestions, protestations and general nags to rebound soundlessly in the vacuum of sibling selective hearing.
On those days, Fear might be with you, sure, perhaps even all day long. But she is little more than a gnat buzzing at the periphery of your existence, unworthy of attention and certainly not cramping your style. And so on those days, the fences are still scaled and neighbourhoods ruled, the challenges faced and opportunities seized. For on those days as before, the world remains undeniably yours for the taking, even with that tiny brat called Fear in tow.
But just as often, Mother Dearest’s command will cause you to pause in your hurried excitement, caught up short for just a moment. And it is in that moment, before you can even begin to devise a clever evasion strategy, that — blamo! Sister Fear is there in all her Osh Kosh B’Gosh glory, an unshakable part of your day’s adventures, and this time, not just in the periphery.
And on those days, everything changes.
Eagerness fades. Bright eyes dull. Bushy tails deflate.
On those days, you don’t even consider scaling fences or racing rooftops, not with sister Fear’s constant barrage of increasingly dire warnings. Instead, you find yourself ignoring opportunities and turning your back on challenges, limiting risks and leaving discoveries unearthed. For on those days, it is the Osh-Kosh-bedecked tyrant who wins, as you resignedly trade the possibilities of the unknown for yet another day of safer play.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Snotty-nosed that she is, sister Fear obviously serves a vital evolutionary function. Like protecting us from lions. And tigers. Occasionally bears. Definitely raptors. All things that, absent her bratty presence, we might approach with too little appreciation for the potentially disastrous consequences.
Yet I still somehow doubt that when gifting our ancestors with this thing called Fear, Momma Nature was intending to eventually protect we their descendants from such horrifying, disaster-inviting things as, say:
Publishing a blog?
’Cause let’s get real for a moment: I have been writing this thing for, what — ‘round about a decade, give or take a few centuries? In my head. Out loud. Around edges of old magazines. In barely decipherable notes blindly touch-typed on several generations of phones at 2 AM. Heck, there’s even a handful of essays sitting in draft on other blog sites, languishing in digital limbo.
Yet taking that final step and actually publishing something? Where other humans could read it? That step fucking terrified me. Or, more accurately — fucking terrifies, present tense. Like Dark Crystal Muppets, creepy-as-fuck-light-bulb fish, stuff-of-my-worst-nightmares kind of terror. It is a fear of everything and of nothing. Of trolling responses and post-publish silences. Of behind-my-back ridicule and to-my-face criticism. Of narcissistic navel-gazing and disingenuous representation. Of infinite failure and finite success. Of public exposure and private shame.
Put simply, I am good and scared shitless.
Yet as the years continue to pass, and the essays to collect digital dust, I’m coming to increasingly accept that true fulfilment and belonging are only achievable if I show up fully in the world — open, vulnerable and honest. And so after countless talk-therapy-filled years of neurotically asking myself “why” I am my particular brand of crazy — and of course generating an inexhaustible list of viable answers — I’ve started instead to ask myself “what”.
What kind of person am I? What amps me up? What is most important to me, societal pressures aside?
And more specific to today’s topic, what the hell keeps me writing, day in and day out, if only in the echo chamber of my mind?
And the answer is actually quite simple: namely, I was born with a full head of hair and way too many words. And by “way too many,” I mean way too many. Ask six-year-old Sarah for a page on her summer vacation? You’re getting ten. Assign academic Sarah a 25-page essay? Best specify font and spacing limitations, or you’re getting 25 pages of 10-point font at maybe 1.25 spacing — if you’re lucky. Befriend Sarah? Prepare yourself for novels disguised as texts. Email Sarah at work? That response be coming your way in full paragraph form, complete with proper transitions and, more often than not, some random, newfangled metaphor that just happened to come to mind in the five minutes it took to reply.
In short, I am the verbose version of Lady Macbeth, my mind is stained with words and, after way too many years, I need this shit out.
Yet even more importantly, I deeply believe in the value of sharing our most honest stories about our struggles to negotiate the grand messiness of life. Think of them as antidotes to the glossy surrealism that pervades social media, hinting at impossible lives, perfectly lived. Because I get that we all have highs, sure, and more often than not, that’s the side of our lives that we’d prefer to share. It’s just so much cleaner that way, that much more likeable. And heck, the dopamine hits sure don’t hurt.
But the fact is, we don’t just have highs. We also all have lows. Heck, sometimes we have sideways. And while we ourselves are originals, these experiences rarely are. At least one other human has likely lived a similar moment, fought a similar battle, cracked a similar door, burned a similar bridge — never exactly the same, but something just close enough to our own experience that the insights carry and lessons apply. And I firmly believe that it’s by discovering these nuggets of base universality that true connection can be forged, and — just maybe — we can all start feeling a little less alone.
So I guess that’s my goal: to build a tiny repository of words on everything from the banal to the profound, with the hope that in their sharing, I might uncover a sliver of that universality and maybe, just maybe, show at least one other person that they’re not alone, no matter what they might believe. Some of these words will be stories, reflections from a recovering A-type learning to live off-script. Others will be essays, covers of age-old tunes whose revised melody or altered beat will hopefully shine new light on familiar themes. With any luck, some among their number will prove thought-provoking. Others might amuse or reassure, while still others just simply fail to land. And that’s okay, too. I’ve come to accept that this will be anything but a perfect endeavour, and frankly, I don’t want it to be either. Life is too beautifully messy for paint-by-number perfection, and as a recovering perfectionist, this is my chance to just “Frizzle” it for once.
Or at least, to try.
So no, I won’t promise you perfection. Heck, I can’t even promise you regularity. But what I can promise with a clear conscience is candour, honesty, and not a little bit of vulnerability. I think that’s the least I can do in exchange for your attention.
To return to our metaphorical summer day, I confess that I’ve allowed myself to default to that third and final response whenever facing this particular threshold: to reconsider and make excuses, to dismiss dreams and ignore opportunities. But I realize now that that leads to a more limited life than I want to live.
And so I say — fuck it. Maybe I won’t be able to outrun sister Fear. Maybe I won’t even be able to ignore her. Maybe all I’ll be able to do is tie her to some inner tree just long enough to hit that damned “Publish” button once. Twice. Heck, maybe even ten times.
’Cause here it is, folks: I’m scared shitless — and I’m doing it anyway.
I guess this is what winging it feels like.
Sort of.
Fuck, I sure hope those ropes hold…
Originally published at wingingitsortof.wordpress.com on March 16, 2018.
