Chasing Fear
Once there was a time when all I sought was safety. As a consequence, my life grew grayer, I grew more anxious and depressed, and hard times found me anyway.
In 2018, when I took the leap to become a Camp Gladiator trainer, I learned something new. Stepping way outside your comfort zone and into the things you fear the most can be the best thing you ever do.
There’s an amazing clip of Will Smith talking about skydiving. Google it. I’d watched it before, and enjoyed it, but I saw it on a team retreat when I was two months into being a CG trainer, and it hit me hard. Taking the leap to operating as a small business owner and living the life of a CG trainer forced me to face many of my biggest struggles at once. Talking to strangers. Asking people for things (I hate doing that and it takes all I’ve got to do it). Talking on the phone. Convincing people I was offering something worthwhile when they were skeptical. Taking a financial risk. Being confident in myself. I also transitioned from being a stay-at-home mom with a couple side gigs back to full time work. Fear of rejection, failure, coming up inadequate. I wanted desperately to be successful and was terrified of failing at something I loved. Two months in, I was still doubtful of my success (I shouldn’t have been at that point; I was successful beyond my wildest dreams in that short time), but I was happier than I’d been in a very long time and I felt very much alive. The part of the Will Smith video that absolutely entranced me was when he started talking about how the best things in life are on the other side of fear. I don’t agree with the concept that you shouldn’t feel afraid. I very much feel that part of what makes those things amazing is coming through the fear to the other side.
2018 became the year I didn’t just step, I leapt with both feet out of almost all my comfort zones at once. It was impossible-feeling and tragic and terrifying and grief-filled and empowering and led to some of the worst moments and best things to happen in my life. It was a necessity, but also, over the following years, chasing fear became almost a mantra of mine.
The end of 2018, going into the beginning of 2019, was a very dark time. In the spring of 2019, I started making a list. When I talk about this list, people call it a bucket list, but that’s not exactly what it is. A bucket list is things you want to do before you die. My list is made up of things I’ve always wanted to do but never dared attempt because of fear. Some of it was fear of doing something scary, but most of it was fear of what others would think, or fear of push-back from others. Fear of striking out on my own and doing what I wanted because I clung so tightly to what I was “supposed” to be or do. Fear built on other people’s fears. I had strapped myself into a life focused on finding safety and not disrupting the status quo, around pleasing others at my own expense. For many years, I didn’t know how to begin to try many of the things I wanted to try, and it felt too scary to even find out. So I just kept marching, like a zombie, through the world I thought I was supposed to inhabit. This list flies in the face of those fears, whether they were justified or not.
There are over 100 items on the list now, and I’m always adding. Honestly, starting a blog and sharing my writing and the things I’ve shared are things that I never even thought to add to the list before doing them, but they definitely fit the bill. Whenever my life starts to feel gray or stagnant or like it’s lost a bit of the freedom and magic I’ve been building into it over the past few years, I go back and cross something off my list. When I start to feel down about where I am in the present moment and what I haven’t gotten yet, I remind myself of all I’ve done and how I’ve built my life into something I’m excited to be living.
Thanks to this list of uncomfortable and scary things, I’ve paradoxically gotten comfortable with more and more things: with asking for help and with doing things on my own, with trying something new, with who I am. Here are some of those things I’ve done.
**As a caveat before we begin, I’ve also learned the difference between the things I SHOULD fear (like that twist of the gut telling me this is a person I shouldn’t let into my life) and the things that I fear but have what I most want on the other side of them.
#1: Travel on my own. I was newly single after my marriage and lying on the couch with a bulging disc when I came across an ad for individual travelers to travel in groups to different places around the world and I fell in love with the trip to Morocco. I couldn’t afford it at the time, but Morocco has been in my head ever since. I’d studied abroad in France for a month in high school, and I’d traveled on my own to a couple Fit4Mom conferences and a friend’s wedding, but that was it. Other than that, I’d traveled with family and my ex, and I’d put off my dream trips because it didn’t seem worth overcoming the resistance and potential pitfalls.
I was petrified at the conferences. I didn’t know anyone there. When I was in elementary school, I switched schools every year or two for a variety of reasons, so I became reasonably good at making new friends. But along the way, partly because I cocooned in on myself to heal from some things and partly because I let outside influences isolate me, I stopped making new friends in college. It grew much harder. I got back into it when I got a job on my own in teaching, and then with Fit4Mom even more so, but I was still extremely shy and unsure of myself. I felt I inherently didn’t belong with people I didn’t know or in places I’d never been. I remember arriving at the conference and my room wasn’t ready yet. Faced with a lobby full of moms/trainers I’d never met, I chose to retreat to an isolated park bench to hide from having to talk to anyone. I called home in tears. That social anxiety was paralyzing. I had to face it all over again walking up to the mixer later that evening, when everyone was already chatting in circles and I hung my head alone near the appetizer table. Eventually, I attached to some other moms and had a great time, but the beginning was agonizing.
Teaching Fit4Mom helped a lot. By the time I traveled to that friend’s wedding in 2017, I was almost not-panicked at doing things on my own, and almost not-worried about what others thought I was doing in places I clearly (to me) didn’t belong. I explored a riverside in Vermont all on my own and actually enjoyed myself. It took my CG area director pointing out that I loved people for me to notice that about myself, but that also changed my internal narrative around meeting strangers. To a greater extreme, CG pulled me out of my fear, basically through meeting stranger after stranger and having to make them feel welcome (something you can’t do if you’re hiding from them). It was a sort of exposure therapy, and it taught me that in the end, we’re all people and it’s not so scary to talk to another human being. I also started to finally value myself, which took care of a lot of the feelings of shame and not-belonging. But 2020 was my first trip where I felt comfortable enough in my own skin to truly just go follow my heart by myself. I had the chance to do that epic trip I wrote about before, where I just took off and waited to see where I ended up. That trip also let me cross off #29: Go on a spontaneous trip and #49: Drive until I get lost/#104 Drive and see where the road takes me (sometimes I get a little redundant in my list).
#27: Go hang gliding. I’ve always dreamed of flying. But hang gliding looked so dangerous, and there were people in my life who liked to remind me of the risks of everything. In October 2019, I drove 3 hours west just to hang glide. The leaves were changing. It was a gorgeous sunny October afternoon. I wound through the foothills of North Carolina until I pulled up a gravel drive to a field stretching out to trees and edged with blue mountains in the distance.
My nerves buzzed as I signed my paperwork, but a surprising calm took over me as I rode a golf cart driven by a friendly stranger over to the hang glider in the middle of the field. I chatted happily with the people running the place (marveling internally at my ability to do so). I strapped in and a small plane took off with us tethered behind it. I expected more fear. It didn’t feel scary. It felt peaceful. We bumped along behind the plane and then rose high in the sky until the trees looked tiny and you could see the mountains clearly in the distance. The tether released, and we were gliding. The tandem pilot showed me how to take over the controls and find thermals. Turning down and to the side sent us speeding up down, and made my head spin. I loved the thrill of it but didn’t want to make it end too quickly. I tried to take it all in, the mountains in the distance and the glow on the fields, and then we were landing. I was a little let down that I didn’t feel like I had to overcome more fear. That was when the skydiving decision was cemented. I knew that would be the ultimate face-your-fears scenario. I stopped under a tall bridge on the way home and watched the sun set and a crane fish, and took in the past year.
#44: Get a second ear piercing. It sounds little, but it felt big at the time. My mom always criticized people with too many piercings growing up. I wanted more holes. I was about a month into splitting custody with my ex, in early 2019. Nothing felt right, to not have the little boy who’d been my constant companion and the focus of my life for years, not there with me. After a particularly awful week of divorce stuff, I was living in a very dark place, and felt terrible about myself and my life. I was filling my childless time however I could, so I subbed for another trainer in Durham and then decided I was stopping to get that second piercing. I drove down the street to Southpoint mall, and got in line at Claire’s behind a little girl who was getting her ears pierced for the first time. Driving home, I felt like I had some form of control over my life again, and I loved the look.
#55: Ride a motorcycle. It was almost a year before I tried dating. It wasn’t so much a matter of “getting back in the game” as it was “getting in the game for the first time as an adult and trying to figure out what the heck it was.” I’m still not sure. But my first first date in 19 years included riding on a motorcycle with a guy I’d met. So I felt like at the very least I started with a bang. The following year, I dated a guy for a few months who had a motorcycle and one of my favorite date night activities was when he would take me the long way around Falls Lake on the way to dinner. I don’t know that I’ll do it, at least not while my son is little because I worry about the safety, but learning to drive a motorcycle and getting my own is also on my list. I fantasize about taking it out on my own on summer evenings. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to feeling like flying—weirdly even closer than hang gliding.
#43: Get a tattoo. I’ve wanted one since college. There were people in my life who discouraged me strongly. In maybe 2017, I started hashing out an idea. The silhouette of a tree, in black ink. Birds flying out of it. Stark, dead branches transforming into life, into flight. I started making notes, finding pictures I loved. I had to explain to multiple people that it was my body, my decision what I did with it. In October 2019, I had known what I wanted for years and I had my initial consultation. My first appointment was scheduled for June 2020. Then COVID hit, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to do it. It was one of those universe moments, though. Everything was shut down, and then the tattoo studios were allowed to reopen the day before my appointment. It took until April 2021 to finish.
I was scared of the pain walking into the first appointment. I kept reminding myself that I’d given birth, much of it without medication, and that I did dry needling all the time. Still, when the needles started buzzing for the first time, I cringed. The first bite of the needle was hard, but in some ways not as bad as I’d feared. That day, she spent three hours outlining my idea and making it fit the contours of my back. I used the pain to remind myself of all that I’d been through and overcome. I settled into it, at times even getting into an almost meditative state. As time passed, I couldn’t hold that, but I still was so determined to make it through. It felt like victory, like rising, which was what I wanted my tattoo to mean. Over the course of that year of tattooing, so much changed again. I feel like those moments, the places I was at during each appointment, are etched into my skin now, more things I’ve risen above or preserved as a part of me.
#35: Be comfortable working out in just a sports bra.
#45: Get an undercut and #46: Try a pixie cut. This was one I put off for a very long time because I wasn’t sure how I’d look. I had had shorter (chin-length) hair a couple times in my life and always hated it. I’d had multiple men tell me when I was with them that they preferred my hair longer and at those times I listened. But I loved the shorter look on other people. I told my hairdresser and we started with the undercut. I loved it so much, I wanted more. The timing was perfect, and by the next appointment I was ready for the drastic change of chopping it all off. To my shock, I came out of it looking like more myself than ever.
I like this picture because it shows the three biggest changes in my appearance: hair, ear piercing, and tattoo. They’re external, but I was driving in the car on the way to sky diving and “Reflection” from Mulan came on. I started crying, because I finally feel like my reflection finally shows who I am inside—and I’m living the life that reflects me, too.
#83: Play the piano in public. After my ex-husband and I split up, I started playing the piano again, as a cathartic exercise. I memorized one of my favorite songs, “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, and played it in a tiny bagel shop near my house while my son and I were waiting for bagels one morning. Then in early 2020, I went out with friends to dinner and then Cotton House to celebrate something big. We gathered with our beers on velvet couches in this old, creaky house and talked for hours. I’m infinitely lucky to have had the support I’ve had over the years from friends, my chosen family. The whole time, I thought about that list item and the piano that I knew was in another room. Finally, late at night, I crept into that room to the ancient instrument. My friends followed me in, egging me on and promising to stand between me and an entire group of strangers sitting around nearby. My hands shook, but I told myself no one was listening. I began pressing the keys, which were worn and on slightly different levels, and quickly realized that what I told myself wasn’t true. The intoxicated strangers stopped talking. My fingers stumbled, but I kept going. They listened a moment, and then exclaimed they knew the song. I apologized for not playing it well, and they said I was playing it better than they could. The next thing I knew, one stranger after another started singing along.
“Maybe there’s a God above,
And all I’ve ever learned from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
It’s not a cry you can hear at night,
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light,
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”
In a magic moment I could have never imagined, we were connected. It was the perfect ending.
This list is about building the life I want. Not all of the items have worked out like I wanted them to or felt good (looking at you, #32: Fall in love again), but I’ve grown from all of them. Many of the list items are little things (#71: Dance in the middle of the street. #47: Do some ninja course training. #18: Do an escape room), but they’re part of learning who I truly am and staying true to it. There are many more I haven’t done yet. #7: Sleep under the stars (i.e., not in a tent). #21: Sing for real in public. #4: Get my book published. #91: Run a Ragnar at night. #3: Travel to New Orleans. #103: Sell my things and travel the world after my son grows up. It’s about filling my life with joy, experiencing the life I want to live instead of staying inside the guardrails of anxiety and others’ judgment. It’s about not cowing down to fear.
Which leads us to #28: Go skydiving.