Fear and All Its Friends

 

I’ve been dealing with a lot of fear lately. Most of it is self-made… well more accurately, all of it is. An interesting thing about fear is that the majority of it is learned. I don’t know about you, but that fact blew me out of the water when I heard it. From birth, we are programmed with two inherent fears for the sake of survival: the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling. Everything else that creates the fear response within us is learned -  by our environments, our parent’s fears, and our experiences.

A common fear for most of us, and certainly myself, is the fear of failure and rejection.

I love dancing. I feel like I’ve said that lukewarm sentence my whole life, and it doesn’t begin to do the feeling justice. I trained in classical ballet, modern, lyrical, contemporary, and jazz from the ages of 3-17. My ultimate dream as a young girl and teenager was to be a professional ballet dancer. However, like most adolescents, I struggled severely with body image, eating issues, and separating my worth as a person from my ability to dance.

Here’s the deal. I was a good dancer, and more importantly I loved it deeply. I loved the long, grueling rehearsals, I loved spending my whole day in a studio or theater, and I loved the unmatched thrill of performing on a stage. Unfortunately, during my teenage years I didn’t possess that “I’ll do it no matter what” drive. I couldn’t get out of my own way. I constantly told myself I’d never be good enough, I’d never be a professional, and whom was I to think I could do this as a career. I was so damn afraid of genuinely trying and failing because that would mean my very best effort wasn’t enough. And that in turn meant I wasn’t worthy as a person (at least in my mind.)

This was all compounded by the emotionally abusive relationship I was in from 15-16 with someone who constantly told me I was lucky they wanted to be with me. I was indoctrinated with phrases like, “if it weren’t for them, no one would want me.”  This was the first boy I ever “loved”  (if you can call it that), and is often the case,  he paired his abuse with excessive alcohol consumption, which I also joined in, and certainly didn’t help. Like a lot of addictive drugs or relationships, the highs were so high that I was convinced I had to keep it up. He’d tell me I was his dream girl and he’d never love anyone like me. I was perpetually trying to prove to him I was the dream girl, and not the girl that was “lucky” or unworthy.

With a decade of reflection and perspective, it seems obvious to me exactly how I ended up with someone like him at that time. I already had an incredibly weak sense of self and value. I was the perfect target.

Fortunately, some semblance of common sense eventually got through to me, and I finally ended the relationship 6 months before I turned 17. Unfortunately, by then I had also ended my relationship with dance. I told myself it was time to be realistic, I would never be good enough to do anything with it, and I’m just wasting my time. I remember feeling so proud of myself for this reasonable and pragmatic decision. Please note the sarcasm.

So I put away dance, and I’m sure it seems obvious, had a few really hard years. Around 19 I started to learn how to take care of myself, allowed myself to go for things I wanted, and I got into a wonderful and satisfying career in health and fitness. I became a Yoga teacher, and kept movement in my life. Because I LOVED it. Through moving the body, I could express the things I couldn’t and still can’t say through the physical self, and it gave me meaning and fulfillment.

I remember through my early twenties watching my best friend, who I had danced with in high school, pursue her dreams of dancing and art. I felt a lot of jealously and resentment towards her for that. Thankfully, even in my jumbled up brain at that time, I never acted on those feelings. I don’t think I ever even voiced them, or put them into words until just now. I was ashamed of the feeling. Even then something was telling me it had nothing to with her. Somewhere in me I knew I was mad at myself, angry that I took away my dream. That I gave up. That I had deprived myself for a decade of something I cherished. I had achieved failure without even going for it, which was, is, painful to accept.

At the beginning of 2020, I was going through a bad breakup, moving back in with my parents, and generally feeling like a loser. Joking aside, I was pretty lost. This particular relationship had some very similar aspects of the one I experienced at 15 years old. I felt so stupid for doing that again and like I couldn’t trust myself. On top of that, the Pandemic was in its peak and I had no work, much like everyone else all over the World.  Life was feeling bleak. Then, that same blessed best friend was having lunch with me on one of my first days back home. She asked me something along the lines of “Do you want to talk about it, or do you want me to tell you something?”

I chose the latter.

She told me she’d been enrolled in dance classes through the college, and that I was going with her to class the next morning at 8 am. Didn’t ask, didn’t give me an option to say no. This singular moment holds so much significance for me. It is literally a moment I can pinpoint when I finally started healing. I’ve told her before, but I’m not sure she’ll ever fully understand what that small act of love, and care did for me. Such a small thing is pivotal in the trajectory of my life now. In a small way she saved me. She’s one of the closest people in my life. I trust her implicitly, and she told me I was going to dance class with her as a matter of a fact, not choice. Much is the fashion of her personality. I had no other option but to say OK, and I went. My soul broke wide open and the little girl who has been screaming at me to dance again burst forward.

Something inside me finally came to life, and it was a fierce sense of determination to get past my fear. Not just the fear concerning dance, but all my fear. All my past hurts, rejections, mistakes, failures, shame, all the parts of me that I consider ugly and unworthy to be seen.

A lot of this also came from watching all the loss, death and complete upheaval of people’s lives all over the world this past year and half. Some of it is from getting closer to turning 30, being far too aware of the shortness of life; that it can all end in an instant.

I’ve started looking at it like this. What is worse, literally dying, or doing the things that I love regardless of how scary, unknown, or uncomfortable they feel? Well, it seems pretty clear that it’s almost always worse to literally die. Again, joking aside, and I am joking, I have a deep appreciation for the life I am fortunate to be living. I am loved, I am healthy, I am financially stable, and if I had only that it would be far more than enough.

I think it is hard for me to address my long standing emotional trauma because it feels like I’m being ungrateful. As well as the current narrative that if one is privileged they don’t also know suffering of any kind. There is group guilt thrown all over the place, telling those that look a certain way, love a certain way, live a certain way; they don’t have a right to their trauma and hurt. Because there are those worse off. Which is true, but not that helpful or useful when you are in fact, experiencing your life falling apart.

I know I must not be alone in feeling this. I know there must be others who ignore their need to heal, their need to seek professional help, their need to reach out to their loved ones, because overall their life is pretty good. I mean there are actual human beings who are currently enslaved, oppressed, starving. And I am what? Afraid to try for some sort of a career in dance because I’m “old” and don’t fully grasp my sense of worth?

But here is something else I realized. It is for exactly this reason – that because I still can, that I should. How ungrateful would it be to not pursue exactly the life I want because others are not able to, because I need to punish myself for my privilege? To perpetuate the cycle of fear, self-loathing, abusive relationships, and self-sabotaging. I want to have children someday, I want to be an example to them. If I don’t start loving myself, allowing myself to go for the things I want, then I’ll show my future children that is acceptable. Then it all goes again for another generation.

Things could be so very much worse. For some, this mentality isn’t helpful. For me it is. I remind myself of how incredibly lucky I am, how much good is already in my life. I remind myself that the fear I feel towards going for my dreams, doing things that feel out of reach, asking for what I want, won’t kill me. Literally, I will physically survive it. Fear is a protective emotion, its ultimate goal is to keep you safe and alive. Somehow, through the development of society we feel fear in situations that have nothing to do with life or death. Which makes it very hard to do those things that bring up fear, because we are feeling a deeply engrained instinct to RUN. It’s impossible to run from an invisible predator.  So instead we deny ourselves the things we want.

So if I have learned anything, it's that I cannot continue to run from what I fear, instead I'm running right towards. 

Unless it's a bear, I'll probably still run from bears.