Fear of Fear

The people who seem to have it all are not fearLESS, they've learned to do things while being afraid.

I had the wonderful pleasure of chatting with another Connection Experiment performer, (you know who you are), this morning for a couple of hours. As is always the case when we get together, we talked about music, life, family, love, the stories we tell ourselves, our deepest insecurities, how difficult it can be to manage time, the challenges of prioritizing, you know, lightheaded 'first thing in the morning' stuff.

The topic of fear as musicians came up, and then we got to talking about fear in general. Who doesn't feel scared sometimes? I want to meet you! How do you do it? It's so easy to get stuck in the mindset, "I feel afraid because...and once I fix this, this, and this...I will no longer feel scared". But unfortunately, fear doesn't work this way. It is a sneaky beast that lurks around every corner, crawling around like a reanimated corpse (thank you fellow mom friend--you know who you are--for the amazing picturesque description of crawling).

Fear is not something we can ever overcome. There, I said it. We will all be scaredy pants forever. Ok, not really. But, it is true that we can not ever 'get over' fear. We won't ever reach a magical point in our lives where we don't experience fear. There's no amount of greatness that will grant you a free pass from this awful feeling. Each day, if we choose to be brave, and if we choose to do the things that make us afraid, if we practice showing up and allowing ourselves to be uncomfortable IN the fear, we will eventually become more comfortable with being uncomfortable. The people we see who seem to have it all are not fearLESS, they've learned to do things while being afraid.

-Ashlee Young