I have never wanted to be someone else. However, I have not always been comfortable being myself. I cannot pinpoint a time where I was desperate to conform. But, I did want to fit in. Peer pressure was present but not relevant to me. Growing up, there was always something different about me. Peers, friends, teachers, and people who spent time with me at length all pointed it out. It never allowed me to fully blend in. I was uncomfortable with that. Some call it an old soul, others maturity, or just an unidentifiable something. While some love me because of it, many did not receive it well. I thought the older I got, the more ‘it’ would disappear. College was supposed to save me. It did not.
While I should have been confident, bold, and unapologetic in my difference, I was not for a long time. My dream has always rooted in using my voice, but even fully doing that petrified me. I drifted in between complete oblivion and hyper consciousness of how people received and experienced me. My oblivion was rooted in just moving through the world being myself. But, my consciousness was awakened by people sharing their perceptions of me which were often not aligned with who I actually was. I began to feel like there were things about myself I should be able to turn off.
The dream of using my voice became accompanied by the need to make myself smaller, palatable, packaged. The fear of people misconstruing my words, intentions, or presence affected my self confidence, education and career choices, social life, as well as my dating life.
Fear almost killed me because it convinced me that I had to tame myself; cut myself in compartmentalized doses to be understood. I believed that packaging myself in a box was the way to go, and it stifled me. Fear almost killed me because I did not put myself out there when I should have. In places and situations where I had authority, I exchanged it with inferiority.
Fear took amazing ideas and talked me out of it, persuaded me to put it on the back burner, leave it for later, a perfect time that was never coming. Fear made a fool of the faith I toted, because faith and fear cannot dwell in the same vessel. Fear mocked my relationship with God. I found myself handing over my burdens to Him, but not trusting Him with it. Struggling with the balance of control I didn’t have, choking my spirit with self inflicted limitations, and fear that did not belong to me, almost killed me.
Les Brown is a motivational speaker who painted a picture of graveyards being the wealthiest places on earth. He discussed how ideas, albums, talents, inventions and so much more die with people who never take the leap of faith and just do it. I did not want to be that person full of potential, dreams deferred, with opportunities missed. A carcass of ones self stealing life from everything innately you and giving life to nothing whose essence is innately you. When you embody that, you die way before you are dead.
Previously, the worst outcome of my fear seemed to be failure. Now, the worst outcome is never having done anything at all. When I think about the ideas I am just now nurturing whose genesis was many years ago, the only difference is my lack of fear and unapologetic nature.
Fear is incredibly irrational. Yet, powerful enough to have stolen so much from me. It took a long time for me to forgive myself for all that I gave away because of the fear that consumed me. Fear has caused me to live in the state of transition too long. Fear has been a blocker, shielding me from the failure that I was convinced I would die from if it ever came, even though it never came.
Today, fear no longer knows me intimately.
