Sitting in a Starbucks, thinking about fear.
It’s a strange thing is fear, it tugs at your sleeve constantly as a reminder that you’re talentless, imperfect, a blight that the perfect tolerate with amusement. Fear transforms those dreams that come to you in wild moments, turns them to grey clouds that hang ominously over your ambitions before releasing their deluge of doubts that soak your dreams into the cold ground.
Fear needs to be dealt with.
In some ways it is healthy, it prevents you from doing really stupid stuff, you know what I mean – the jumping off a wall that’s just a little too high for safety, the walking down a short cut late at night which takes you down an unlit alleyway. However, if we are not aware of how fear insinuates itself into our lives then we may find one day that it rules every decision with little recourse for argument.
My personal Fear is a little voice in my head that says, “You think that story is worth reading?” whenever I write something. A persistent whisper whenever I read a book, “You’ll never write as well as this author does.” I see all my words through Fear’s eyes and find them lacking in everything I admire in other writers. I will silence my Fear.
I talk to other writers and realise that, at one stage they had a similar Fear whispering sour nothings in their ears. In some cases they still do despite successful publications. I’ve heard it said that to conquer an irrational fear you should just do what you fear. Therefore I will do what I fear, I will write and I will publish and I will learn from my mistakes and I will be able to say to my Fear, “You have no power over me.”
