Day 2 and I don’t want to write!

But, what if no-one’s watching?

What’s on my mind?

I could write about the courage vs comfort thing: the fork in the road tally that I’ve added to my checklist

Or I could write about the “our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”

The latter feels scarier, so, at this fork in the road, that’s what we’re gonna do

Eek

OK

I have a crowd of internet friends who are all about business

And I have a crowd of internet friends who are all about introspection, self-growth, stepping out from the profane to the philosophical/spiritual.

There’s not much overlap.

Which is a lot of why I feel scary writing about it—fear of judgement from the business crowd, who it kinda feels like have all their shit together.

I know this can’t be 100% true. There’s a selection bias where I’m picking the ones that I “look up to”¹ as having all their shit together… and even then they of course don’t, they’re just showing a highlight reel.

I’m strong enough that I can make space for that fear emotion. Step into it.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

This quote hit hard for me.

It tied together a lot of things that I’ve been trying to articulate clearly. Which is why now is the time that I’m finally writing my thoughts on the topic.

Gym, haircut etc

I’m pretty much completely fine with these now, but until my 30th year or so I felt self-conscious about doing common tasks like getting a haircut, shopping for clothes, going to the gym. Anything self-improvement ish, basically.

Why?

Because on some level I didn’t feel like I ‘deserved’ to have that improvement. What if I did it wrong? People around me seemed like they knew exactly what clothes to buy, whereas I had no idea, and didn’t have the confidence to go by my own taste—I grew up with a huge judgment culture around me, so there was just so much fear of the judgment of others for whatever I attempted.

I liken it to the challenge an obese child might face if they decided to start running in an attempt to lose weight. The appropriate response as far as I’m concerned would be impressed-ness, and encouragement… but you could easily imagine bullies teasing the child tremendously. (Related: crabs in bucket??)

I wasn’t obese, but it was a similar fear to that—that I’d be judged for trying to improve things that I “should just accept” I’m no good at, like dressing well, being attractive, desirable.

I’ve worked on it immensely the last couple of years—I feel deserving, now, but some of those sensations around being scared of what I might be capable of and whether I deserve them, linger.

Doing half a job

I’ll often leave tasks unfinished. Like, I’ll empty the dishwasher, and then not refill it. Or I’ll put away the shopping but leave the bags out instead of putting those away too.

This feels like a smaller-scale example of the exact same phenomenon. Part of my identity is that of the person who doesn’t succeed at everything—in order to stay small, not attract too much attention, because that attention is scary, and feels somehow undeserved? What a screwed up thing to have learnt, but so many of us have learnt it.

Tomorrow(?) I’ll talk about those fork in the road experiences—where we hit an internal conflict between a thing we believe would be best for future-us and a thing that feel more comfortable right now. These are what derail me from doing complete jobs.

Gifted

I think part of it is also tied into the fact that I was a very gifted child and often felt self-conscious about this—I desperately wanted to fit in with the other kids. So part of the fear of success is likely tied in to that.

Success is scary

Am I the only one in my online business friends crowd who has experienced this? I haven’t heard it talked about. But if I’ve experienced it, someone else will have too. Maybe this helps them. That’s such an epic win. Even the possibility of this helping one person makes this so worth it.

1. I have much more admiration for the people who show genuine vulnerability and acknowledge (to themselves and others) that they, of course, do not have all their shit together. But there’s some legacy programming in me that still looks up to the cool kid who acts like they have everything figured out. That’s what I’m referring to here. ↩