Fear is what holds us back. Fear from succeeding, fear from failing, and even fear (or shame) from fearing. We, as emotionally-driven humans, have the power to choose what we are afraid of and what we do about those fears. Our reality is what we choose – what we believe. We don’t have to be afraid of the dark, afraid of change, afraid of losing a loved one, afraid of failing, afraid of losing weight, but something that we have experienced about specific situations have lead us to a perspective of fear.

Fear is a perception of what we believe to be our reality. A child that’s afraid of the dark can be scared because of the reality that he/she perceives – the fear of the unknown combined with the fear of a creature character they experienced while watching a tv show. It is easy for a child to manifest this “reality” in their imagination and believe it to be true because they do not know otherwise… they only know what they experience. We tend to get caught in our fears and build them up to the point that we fear even the thought of overcoming it because it’s simply much easier to just be afraid. I can choose to be afraid or I can choose to stand up to my fears and achieve what I truly want.

Understanding and accepting the consequences of our choices is the first step in conquering our fears. Every choice has a consequence, whether it is “good” or “bad” is up to us of how we define those words based on our beliefs. However, we cannot choose how others perceive it because the definition of reality, right, or wrong is completely different from one person to the next (on top of how we perceive/assume other’s definitions to be). 

We must trust in ourselves, in our path, and in our beliefs. Fear can only exist if we choose for it to exist. Consequences will always be there, yet it is up to us to learn from those consequences for the betterment of our individual paths. On that note, I leave you with a story to help put this into action…

Me and the Hot Stove

My family went out and bought a stove. We never had a stove before so we were all so-excited! My mother has just cooked dinner on the new stove and warned me to not touch it because I’d get hurt – that it’s very hot. Well, jimminy crickets! Ok, I’m not touching that thing because getting hurt sucks so I’ll just avoid the situation all together. So, every day I play with my sweet fire truck by the stove and the thought of it just scares the crap out of me, but I keep on fire truckin’ and pretend it’s not there. Weeks go by and the thing is still there. I don’t know if it’s hot or cool – I just know that it’s there. I begin to play out all of these scenarios in my head of me touching the stove or it coming alive and eating me until one day I just freak out and start running – fire truck in hand, of course. I ran because a) that stove is freaking scary b) I can’t get burned if I’m not near the stove, right? and c) maybe running away will help me forget about it. I find myself running through a field at first. It’s pretty easy, nothing really to get in my way except a few prairie dogs. There’s a forest on the horizon, which could be dangerous but screw it, as long as there isn’t a stove in there I’ll be ok. I get to the forest and it’s just a mess – there are huge trees to dodge, big-ass bushes to run through, snakes to jump over, wolves to run away from, and tons of other wild things that I never experienced before while sitting on my kitchen floor playing with my sweet fire truck. It’s cool though – no hot stoves in here. So I’m running and running, and I keep looking back to make sure the hot stove didn’t magically grow legs and start chasing me. The problem is that I’m so focused on looking back that I forget to look forward to avoid all that crazy shit I just talked about. I run and run and run and then slam – I run right into this huge stove that is planted right in the middle of this forest and I just get burned – third degree burned. Luckily, the burns aren’t too, too bad that I can heal over time, but shit, that REALLY hurt. It immediately made me wonder if I had not run from the household-sized hot stove in the first place, confronted and overcome my fears, then would I have not gotten burned out here in the middle of no where with nothing to help me feel safe? You’re damn right! Now, I have to find my way out because I can’t just sit here and cry about my boo-boo with all of these hungry wolves around me. I have to find a way out and move on with what I learned from the situation – to confront my fears when they first appear rather than letting them build up to become bigger than I could ever imagine. I have gained strength from this situation, too, as I’m at a place in my life that I would have never imagined myself to be. The only way I’m going to get out is by believing in myself and to keep on (fire) truckin’. I obviously don’t know the “right” way out because I wasn’t paying attention to how I got here, but I just have to figure that out as I truck along. I’ll always have the scars on my skin and in the back of my mind to remind me of what NOT to do if the situation comes around again. I need to accept that fact that I got burned and just move on – not necessarily avoiding other future stoves, but to understand the perspective that the stove wasn’t really the problem in the first place.