F.E.A.R
I recently asked my friends on Facebook for sayings that would hopefully help jump start my creative juices. It's funny how when you don't think about something it comes easily and just seems to flow, but the minute you start overthinking, what typically comes naturally, gets a cog jammed in its wheel. Maybe I should start staying up all hours of the night again. In the wee hours of the morning is when I've written my best stuff. Of course that means I'll become a character in the Night of the Living Dead because I'll be a Zombie from not sleeping at all.
Anyway, one of my friends posted the saying "All fear is a lack of faith" I modified it a little bit to say "All fear is the absence of faith". That then triggered the memory of an acronym I heard many years ago. Fear is False Evidence Appearing Real.
Faith isn't just in regard to God. Faith pertains to anyone or anything in which you believe, including yourself. Doubt your abilities, you lack faith in yourself. There is a false evidence telling you that you don't have what it takes. I often call that part of my brain the Critic. The one who tells me all the negative things about myself and why I shouldn't do something. When I started writing this blog I was pretty confident in my writing abilities based on what people said and years of positive feedback. Total strangers have told me I have the ability to write and move them to tears. That belief led me to start this blog. Almost as soon as I started, it didn't take long for me to have fear about writing. I've told myself I couldn't do it many times. I've started then stopped and told myself I'm not really THAT good, a clear absence of faith in myself, my ability, and in the words of many other people who believe in me. There is no evidence that my blog would fail, but one thing would be for sure is if I let my lack of faith in myself get in the way, then surely the blog will fail because I'll never put it out there and no one will read it. Then fear will have won and the lack of faith and the belief in false evidence will have made my fear fact.
Fear of getting married, fear of a cheating partner, fear of deserving good things. So many things to fear. My best friend once told me when things are good in her life that she visualized a pair of shoes dancing across her eyes. She watched those shoes the whole time and waited, waited for one to drop. There was nothing to indicate the shoe would drop, it was her fear. She eventually decided to stop focusing on the shoe dropping because if she didn't she wouldn't be able to enjoy what she was experiencing in her life. She would be wasting energy on looking for evidence that wasn't real and losing out on what was good in her life.
As I write, all the things fear can accompany come flooding to mind. There are lots of things of which to be afraid but perhaps none more powerful than a simple word. Change. It's a word that rattles the nerves like the wind of a hurricane rattles the windows. A Greek Philosopher named Heraclitus once said "There is nothing permanent except change" meaning that nothing will ever stay the same in life except that it always changes making change the only permanent thing. Yet we continue to resist change. We get comfortable in a situation and though it's not ideal, the idea of changing that situation is like changing a poo-tastrophy diaper. It's gross and messy and no one wants to do it. The thing about doing it though, is once the diaper is changed everyone is happy and we we have a fresh new beginning. Sometimes the need for a fresh beginning is what shoves us to change.
One time in my life I quit my job with no job on which to fall back. I did this because I had grown stagnant and bored. When I talked with a friend of mine she said "Well that's what it's all about. Leap and the net will appear". There were lots of factors in changing jobs for me. I had been with my agency for 14 years. I was very established in the work community, and I THOUGHT I only know how to run residential programs. I was terrified that I WOULD leap and no net would show up to catch my ass which would be like me doing a cannonball into a pool. So not pretty. Anyway, I did it. I lept and the net did appear. I got another job running a day program and not only was it a new agency, it was a totally new area of our funding source. I knew no one. I was terrified. I didn't have the faith that I could do this job. My best friend did have the faith, so she held that for me and I chose to believe her and move forward. Turns out I was very successful and it remains my all time favorite job. I'd still be there if the state had never cut funding to it. Anyway, the whole moral of that story is change may be hard, but it's so necessary for growth. There was nowhere for me to go in my former agency and I had been doing the same job for over 10 years and I needed a change so I made one, fear and all. While I had the absence of faith that I could do more, the reality was I had stopped growing where I was and needed a different opportunity, as much as I loved where I was, to grow and to become more. In this case, self preservation overrode fear.
Fear causes regret. How many times do we lack the faith in ourselves and/or others and walk away. What opportunities do we miss when we don't have faith in ourselves or our loved ones. It's like being on a carousel and you see the golden ring but you're too afraid to grab it as you think "I'll fall off the horse, I'll make an ass of myself" so you pass it on by. If we're lucky though, the carousel goes around again for another opportunity to grab that ring and celebrate in the chance we took as we realize we stayed on that horse AND got the golden ring. That's what it's really all about. Taking the chance and facing the absence of faith to find out that the evidence we once believed isn't really evidence at all, but a lie told by our critic.
There are lots of things I would do differently if I could go back. Because of fear, I left the love of my life and my heart is still sad. I can't go back and change that (yes I've tried) but what I can do is recognize fear for what it is. The absence of faith and false evidence we don't have to believe. Fact check yourself, or ask someone to hold your belief until you can. Whatever you do don't let False Expectations Appear Real. Take that fear and have hope. Hold On, Persevere Embrace. Hold on to what you believe, not false evidence, persevere towards that which you want and embrace the change. Go ahead, try it. Start by leaping. The net will be there as soon as you jump. and as someone who has been there, I promise, it WILL appear.
Special thanks to Eric Sidmore for the inspirational quote