#17 - The Tragedy of Cowardice

It traps us.

The fear of failure.

The dreadful nature of exposing ourselves, opening up, only to be ill-received.

But that’s the thing about cowardice, it robs us all of honest experiences.

I’ve been too afraid to write. Too afraid to be honest about the stories, the experiences, the betrayal. What if someone read it? What if I exposed my feelings that I had never been able to personally deliver to them? I was so afraid of feeling like I was subtweeting (subwriting? sub…jecting?) people through personal essays, but I can’t keep holding back from speaking about my own life out of fear that sharing it may cause some people to face my truths about what happened.

Awkward conversations happen. Pissing off a friend through honesty is a part of life. What matters is your intention. Communication doesn’t always go smoothly, even when both parties are trying their best.

And that’s okay. Getting more comfortable sitting in discomfort and processing what is making you uncomfortable about it is actually super revealing.

I hate silence. Fully makes my skin crawl when I just have to wait for someone to respond. But that’s because I like being in control of the conversation, and silence is a very definitive marker that I am not in control anymore.

But I don’t have to suffer painfully in the silence. I only have to suffer until the silence no longer has that power over me. I only have to suffer as long as I continue to hold onto an ill-gotten truth that being in control will grant me safety. (Because it won’t. No matter how well I drive my car there could be a drunk driver, a pothole, a patch of ice. I can’t control everything, but I can train myself to go lax, to look ahead, to drive into the skid.) I only have to suffer as long as it takes me to grant myself ease.

Oftentimes I think it’s easier to suffer in the unknown grey area. I know how to suffer, I know how to cope. I’ve been a “trooper” my entire life. But I don’t know how to help others through suffering that I cannot alleviate for them, I don’t know how to tamp down on the guilt that my actions or words could cause suffering for others. And I fear the reaction more than I yearn for the truth. The tragedy is that I lock myself into a state of limbo for so long that it will seem comfortable. And then I’ll lose all motivation to keep growing because it’s so much easier not to.

But the new motivation has become preserving what would have been lost in the timidity. The actually opportunities wasted. I’m not trying to replace one fear motivator with another, I’m trying to reframe it. It’s no longer, what do I have to lose. It’s: what do I stand to gain?

So, I don’t want to live in fear anymore. I don’t want to look back at my life and feel like I could have said something, should have changed the situation, would have been better off if only.

If only, if only, if only…

I refuse the refrain.

I know how to hate myself, to doubt myself, to stop myself before I even start. I am now, at the ripe age of 29, really earnestly attempting to learn how to love myself, how to support myself, how to lower the bar of entry to the floor so that I can more easily walk over it.

Done is better than perfect! (Says the Virgo through gritted teeth.)

I had to unlearn the fear of being kind to myself. The fear that facing the realities of my situation might cause me to want to change it. The fear that something new could be worse than what I was already doing but it also could be a massive structural improvement that benefits far more people than the current broken system I clung to. (Why yes I did take a course on conservative theory in college and I do deeply reject everything surrounding the notion that trying something new is worse because of the risk involved. (Liberal through and through motherfuckers!) Because it turns out, even if you fail, you’ll have more data and, it turns out, I fucking love data. Oh my god gimme all the (relatively) unbiased stats and allow me to use that information to go into the next situation with even more clarity!)

Anyway, I’m doing a thing where I write down a risk I took everyday. And I have deep anxiety so sometimes the “risk” feels very silly written plainly. (I also have a very visceral reaction to writing anything “cheesy” down because it’s proof that I am, in fact, a giant dork, and ew, gross, how vulnerable.) But it helps the next time I have anxiety about the situation to have written proof that last time I felt this way, it went fine. It’s okay if I call myself brave for completing basic tasks, because it is brave to care about yourself. If I can, with complete sincerity, call my shy cat the Bravest Cat In The World when she comes into the living room to greet new people, I can extend that grace to myself.

So.

Be brave.

It’s worth it.

Even if things don’t go completely right, you’ll have the ability to make it better next time.

And that’s great!

Because failure is totally an option.