“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The recent violent, terrorist assault on the U.S. Capitol has left our whole country reeling. Of course, there were those who wasn’t surprised and those who made apologies on behalf of the domestic terrorists. The overall feeling, however, was a sense of immense fear. It was as though Covid-19 and the horrifying scenes of police brutality in 2020 was just the start of something worse. Some people retreated to the comfort of the known and acted as though nothing had happened. Other people flooded their social medias with scary facts about fascism or dictatorship, overpopulation, scarcity of fresh water, and climate change.
I have lived the life of fear (I will caveat this with the statement that I have never been scared I will be a political prisoner, scared for my life because of the color of my skin, or scared for being able to survive today because I am starving). My father was toxic, brutally violent, and a manipulator of the highest order. There had been times that I had been too scared to sleep or go to the bathroom.
What my experience has taught me are the ways that I stay positive, despite the overwhelming darkness and physical and mental assault that surrounds my life. Here are my tips for how to overcome fear.
Identify What Triggers Your Fear
It seems obvious that we would know what triggers us to want to curl up into a ball and hide under the covers. What may be less obvious is that often times, fear can be disguised as anger. As a child, I had a lot of extreme emotions; anger, sadness, and fear were my constant companions. As I grew older, I recognized that rather than maturing and learning to let go of my anger or sensitivity, they got worse.
It wasn’t until the worst year in my life (a point when I hated my job working for racist and misogynist managers, was in a huge pile of debt, and lost my aunt) that I recognized that I had so many underlying reasons behind my anger. The truth was I was scared.
I was scared of losing one of the few family members I had that I truly loved. I was scared of finding a new job because the prospect of bankruptcy was scary. My father always called me a waste of his money, and so I was scared that he may have been right.
My trigger, as I identified after that particularly difficult year, was feeling like a failure and feeling powerless.
I felt like a failure when my aunt fell to her stroke, and I was powerless to do anything. I was powerless to pay off my debt because I only earned so much, and that felt like a failure to me. Without fail, everything I was scared of in my life was tied to this fear of failure and powerlessness.
Separate Yourself from Your Fear
Here’s the thing; my learning that I am not a failure and that I am not powerless isn’t something did not change overnight, especially because I had been told that my whole life. However, recognizing that those are things I am most scared of has allowed me to take steps necessary to create what I like to call “fail-safes” in my life whenever I approach that despondent feeling.
For me, my “fail-safes” include creating a support system, ingesting only positivity and inspiration in my life, removing all traces of toxicity, and taking a lot of time for self-care.
Everyone’s fail-safes will look different, but they should all accomplish one thing: make you feel loved, supported, optimistic, and overshadow your fears. That is why it was so incredibly important for me to cut out all of the toxic family members that I have because I recognized that they were inhibiting my growth away from my fears. Toxic family members fed my fears instead of starving it out of my life. The moment that I decided to make those changes in my life, I found that I spent more time focused on things that create happiness in my life rather than dwell on the negative.
Allow Yourself the Grace to Be Imperfect
There are times when no amount of encouragement from my support system and no amount of self-care can make me feel better about the things I am scared of. It becomes a spiraling effect because I then feel terrible of being so scared, which in turn makes me feel more of a failure.
Sometimes, when we try so hard to be positive all the time, it becomes extremely exhausting to be perfect. The most important thing I have learned is that on those days when we become exhausted and our fear and anxiety will overwhelm everything, I have to take a step back and allow myself to feel what I feel. We are not deficient or terrible for losing hope at times. What is more important is how we respond to that despondency. Will we make the conscious choice to focus on what we can control and pick ourselves back up?
Most importantly, you are the one you have been waiting for.
Every year, I have a new motto. My motto for 2020 was “have courage and be kind” (taken from Cinderella). In 2021, my motto is “you are the one you have been waiting for” (taken from Frozen 2). I love a good “wake me up when it’s 2022” joke as much as anyone, but all jokes aside, a date on the calendar isn’t the reason for our happiness. I am a firm believer that all of us have the power inside of us to create change. We do not need to wait for anyone to create that happy life that we seek. We are all that we need to make that dream a reality.
I know firsthand how impossible it is to think that you can create happiness when there are so many overwhelmingly negative forces in your life that you can’t control. However, when we allow ourselves the grace to be imperfect and recognize that there are things outside of our control, we start to focus on what we can control. We take back power from those who would seek to deny us of our voices.
Throughout the history of humanity, we have risen up against those that would seek to oppress us, silence us, or take away our freedom. The struggle for freedom, for happiness, for reclaiming our power to create a life we would be proud to live will never end. Creating the world that we have always dreamed of may seem impossible; to borrow from The Greatest Showman, seeing the world we dream of coming into fruition seems like it will take a million dreams coming true. And yet, a stone cast into the water will create large ripples, even if it is small and slow at first. We can be hat firs stone cast. We are everything we need to create the life we dream of.
My hope for all of us in 2021 is that we will start to recognize how powerful we are.
We do not need to succumb to fear nor should we have to live afraid every day. Let’s rise up, reclaim our power, and be the change we wish to see in the world.
