Fear

I've always loved the Anais Nin quote:

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“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Today, I'm looking at it differently. I think this quote is about how fear controls us.

Being the eternal optimist, I've always viewed this quote as the hopeful possibility of the future: the potential that lies within all of us. But today, I'm thinking about how the flip side of that possibility is how we let fear become our driving factor, and how we can choose fear because the fear is more comfortable - painful that it may be - than the risk of stepping outside of fear. It occurs to me with some shock that we can choose the comfort of our fear. The comfort of our fear? Isn't fear uncomfortable? Isn't fear the enemy?

Maybe. But we can grow comfortable with the monster we know, and more afraid of the monster that we don't. We can choose to stay where we are because the fear we know is manageable in some way, and we embrace how scared we are because we're used to it.

I'm experiencing this in three new ways right now:

1) I have been really scared to tell my family story in a meaningful way. While I am crystal clear on my position around my family's Nazi past, I had chosen to stay small with it. I knew that my story was worth telling, but I also feared the repercussions of telling it. I was choosing to stay small. Well, last week I chose to tell it as boldly as I knew how, and I burst through that fear.

2) I have wanted to be a writer ever since I was a little girl, and I have feared that I wasn't good enough or that only "fancy people" could be writers and I was too ordinary or weird and that I could never be a real writer. But this year, I vowed that despite my weirdness or my ordinariness, I'd put myself out there and share what I had to say in an intentional way, and that I could accept if people loved it or hated it, but I had to try anyway.

3) I have a beloved friendship that has spanned many years, but I haven't established healthy boundaries; when things have been uncomfortable, I've chosen to stay quiet. Recently, I set a firm boundary with this friend - and my fears came true. They (I'm not going to reveal their gender as part of anonymity) were angry, hurt, and completely withdrew from me. Two things instantly became clear to me: 1) my fears were founded, and that is why I had not established and maintained healthy boundaries; and 2) I am not who I was, and I am okay despite my friend's reaction.

In all three cases, I've been living smaller than I should have been.

I'm not surprised that in the space of a week all of these things happened. I think that I'm ready, and that I've been setting myself up for growth for a long time, and now the seeds that I've planted are growing.

I grew up in fear that if my parents knew who I really was, they wouldn't love me. It was made clear to me that when I stepped outside of family traditions (gender roles, established patterns, political and religious views, etc.) that I was deviant, unacceptable, mistaken, or just plain stupid. While I've been battling that my whole life (the confines never fit me properly, and I struggled against them), it wasn't until three years ago when my father laid it all out for me that I knew that the line had been crossed - that I did indeed have a boundary, and I'd just discovered it. It's funny that he rejected me, but that was the first time I felt free to say "No."

In the three years since, I've done plenty of reflecting (and therapy) and reading around boundaries, relationships, and why I have the thought patterns that I do, and where those thought patterns serve me and don't serve me. I think I've grown more in three years than I'd grown in the 47 years that came before.

So now that growth is building within me, and I'm not the person I was before. The growth has come with strength: I am much clearer about what I want, what I can tolerate, and what I cannot tolerate. I'm much more clear on what makes me happy, and who I am and who I wish to be (and the overlap between these two is much bigger than it was three years ago).

I made a decision to write; I chose to write about my family history. I am strong enough to weather the consequences - if people resonate with my story, or ignore it, it's okay. If my perspective is flawed, I'm willing to listen. If I have wisdom to offer, I'm willing to own it. My fear, which had been holding me back, suddenly seemed small compared to my desire to be my whole self, to share my truth, and to explore the big world to see what was available to me.

I wasn't consciously thinking about my friendship with X. or how that friendship needed to grow with me. The friendship has many beautiful qualities, and I treasure that friendship genuinely. I see the goodness in X. I also am a different size and shape than I was when the friendship started, but in many ways the friendship hasn't changed shape, and so suddenly I am awoken to the realization that I am uncomfortable, so I said, "I'm uncomfortable, and I need to enforce this boundary, which is about me, not you." X. was hurt and insulted. I looked at my heart, my boundary, my intention. I said, "I do not want to hurt or insult you. This is what I need. I still care about you." I don't know what will happen next, but I know that X. has the right to end the friendship, to refuse to honor my boundary, or to accept my boundary. I am not in charge of X.'s decisions, but I'm not afraid of them. I am at peace with me. I hope that X. and I can remain close, but if we can't, I can accept that too, because I can honor myself as much as I honor our friendship, and because I'm not in charge of other peoples' behavior.

I've never thought of myself as a particularly fearful person. At 22 I traveled Europe alone with a backpack and a Eurorail pass, and found that my spirit was adventuresome. I fought the confines of my family's expectations for me, and created a life of my own. I backpack in bear country. I had the courage to get divorced, I had the courage to change careers. I have faced chemo, radiation, and so many surgeries. I thought I wasn't fearful. People have told me for years how brave I am, and I thought I believed them.

But there are layers to people, and my brave exterior hid an interior that was shaking, frightened, and lately I decided that I was sick of it, that it was time to get real. Pretending to be brave, or being brave only some of the time, no longer serves me.

So here I am, with a clarity that I've never felt before.

Buds are beautiful - they are symbols of hope. But I long to burst into full bloom, to explode with color and gorgeous fragrance and the luxurious velvet of petals. I long for the honeybee to pause, to gorge itself with sticky sweet pollen, to rest on me.

I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid that I will not be beautiful enough, that nobody will enjoy my fragrance. I suddenly that bees love all blossoms, and that my destiny was always to blossom, whether I am the kind of flower that people notice with awe, or whether I am a dandelion in the lawn. I don't know yet what my bloom will look like, but I want to know, and I'm willing to try, because the bud is too small and I can't move and it feels tight and painful. If I'm a dandelion, I hope a child clutches me and presents me as a gift to someone loved. If I'm a rose, I hope that a painter captures my elegance for all time. If I'm a wildflower I hope that the breeze caresses me and that the mountain adores me. I don't know what happens next, who I will be.

But I'm not afraid.