The joy of fear
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. … You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt
***
This quote is a touchstone for me; my main intention in starting this blog was to chronicle my attempts to follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and thereby become a stronger, braver, more confident version of myself. I’ve mentioned this quote to dozens of people over the years, and almost every time, the person I’m talking to brings up a time that s/he “felt the fear and did it anyway.” This week, though, two very different people who have never met each other responded to the quote in a very different, and (to me, at least) unusual way: both said that they were so stubborn and determined that they couldn’t remember ever thinking anything was beyond them as long as they tried hard enough.
I have to admit that I found this completely incomprehensible. Never felt intimidated or overwhelmed? Never endured insecurity or self-doubt? Never suspected they’d bitten off more than they could chew? Never worried about what other people would think or how they might react? Never feared the repercussions of going against the crowd? Never hesitated, even briefly, to say, “I wonder if this is going to work out”?
Never? Not even once?
That seems more than impossible to me; it seems superhuman.
But the flip side — being ruled by doubt — seems equally impossible. I confess that I’ve certainly hung back, kept quiet, delayed, denied, avoided, procrastinated, made excuses, taken the path of least resistance, or simply gone along with the crowd from time to time. The axiom about how the nail that sticks up gets hammered down rings all too true for me some days. Let’s face it: it’s a lot easier, plain and simple, not to do the things you think you can’t do.
But it’s also not as satisfying.
There’s joy in looking fear in the face. In standing up for yourself. In defending someone else. In risking rejection. In entering competition. In challenging conventional wisdom. In claiming authority. In setting boundaries. In examining your preconceptions. In defying your prejudices. In redefining your priorities. In confronting your phobias. In speaking your mind, as activist Maggie Kuhn said, “even if your voice shakes.”
Fear — not terror, but a healthy concern for consequences — is part of the human condition. It’s normal to think you can’t do something. It’s also normal to go ahead and give it a shot anyhow.
This week, find something you didn’t think you could do, and then do it. And come back here and tell me about it.
Filed under Uncategorized, fears, progress, quotes, triumphs | Comment (0)In which I play in traffic
Several years ago, a friend passed her old mountain bike on to me. I was very excited at first. I imagined zipping nimbly around like the people in Amsterdam who commute merrily hither and thither on their beater bikes. I bought padded bike shorts (because I thoroughly approve of any sport for which my own natural padding is inadequate). I even starting thinking about getting panniers, or at least a basket, in which I pictured myself bringing home a baguette and a bouquet of flowers or something equally charming.
Then I realized 2 things:
- Although my neighborhood is fairly flat, San Francisco has some very big hills. And I am somewhat lazy.
- Although San Francisco has a lot of bicyclists and bike lanes, the cars are bigger and more numerous. And I am terrified of getting doored, clipped, or just plain mown down.
As a result, I didn’t ride nearly as much as I thought I would. Yes, I downloaded the SF Bike Map, which not only shows all the official bike routes, but color-codes every street in the city to indicate how steep it is (this is also very useful for walking). I used it to help me figure out where to pedal in my own ‘hood and how to get to the bike paths in Golden Gate Park with minimal risk, but I didn’t dare venture farther.
Until today!
I figured that if I was going to confront my fear of riding on city streets, I should do it on Sunday, when traffic is light, and in the nice, flat, comparatively bike-friendly Mission District. So I rode my bike a few blocks to a bus stop, where I loaded it onto the handy-dandy bike rack Muni provides on the front of its buses. The bus took me up and over the ridge that runs through the center of town. I got off at 18th Street and Valencia. And then I rolled up my jeans, strapped on my helmet, and rode merrily along bike lanes and side streets until I got to Precita Park, where a bunch of street food vendors were dishing it up for a small crowd and a film crew from the Food Network.
I rewarded myself for my courage with a lavender creme brulee and a grilled Gruyere sandwich with onion/fennel/bacon jam before heading home again. Gotta keep up my strength.
Filed under fears, progress, triumphs | Comments (2)The only thing wrong with you
For many, many years, I thought that there was something wrong with me, something that everyone could see but me. I was never quite sure what it was, though. I struggled to fix what I could and hide what I couldn’t fix, and I was either apologetic or defensive about the things I could neither change nor conceal.
I knew, intellectually, that being myself would be a hell of a lot easier than always trying to be someone else. But emotionally, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Because I had the nagging sense that something about me was fundamentally unlikeable, I was afraid people would reject my true self. Yet despite all my attempts to present only the parts of myself most likely to please the person I was with at the time, I could never be sure if anyone actually liked me. If I stopped fixing and hiding and doing my chameleon routine for even a second, people would immediately realize that the picture on the box didn’t match the contents. And nobody likes being misled.
Trying to appeal to everyone and offend no one is one hell of a double bind. Sisyphus himself would understand what an endless task it is.
One day, though, out of nowhere, I had a remarkable idea: Perhaps the only thing wrong with me is…the idea that something is wrong with me. And I thought, you know, why not behave as though that’s true and see what happens?
It’s such a novel notion that I can’t always hang on to it. To be honest, I have to watch myself constantly to keep from slipping back into the belief that I’m not “good enough” just as I am. If I’m an acquired taste, I worry — despite plenty of evidence to the contrary — that perhaps no one will acquire it.
And yet the little green shoots of the idea keep growing. Maybe the things about me that I’ve thought of as flaws are really just facts, neither good nor bad. And maybe instead of trying to compensate or apologize for them, I should try embracing them.
If I believe that, then I don’t need to fix myself or improve myself, because I’m not broken or inadequate in the first place. I just have to reveal my true self, trusting that while I’m not to everyone’s tastes, I also don’t have to be.
What do you think?
Filed under Uncategorized, progress | Comment (1)Made by loving hands at home
I was in 7th grade at the tail end of the ’70s, just before the academic world changed. At the time, 6th grade was the end of elementary school, 10th grade was the beginning of high school, and the three years in between were called “junior high.” Within a few short years, the 9th graders got moved into the high school, the 6th graders took their place in the junior high building, and those in-between years were dubbed “middle school.” Oh, and both Home Ec and Shop became electives.
In my day, though (she said, cursing those young whippersnappers on her lawn), they were a required part of the 7th grade curriculum. Sure, it was end of the ’70s, so a handful of boys signed up for Home Ec, just as a handful of girls signed up for Shop, and we all sang “Free to Be…You and Me” together. (Okay, kidding about that.) But we had to take one or the other. Since I had already discovered that I liked and was fairly good at cooking, I figured I could coast through Home Ec. I was wrong — because cooking was only half the class. The other half was sewing. And instead of coasting, I very nearly failed.
Oh, I learned how to hand-sew a button back on when it fell off, a skill which I’ve managed to retain to that day. But cutting out a pattern, threading a sewing machine, and actually attaching the fabric according to the directions all escaped me. I chose the simplest pattern imaginable — a top essentially made of four squares of fabric stitched together at the corners — in a loud pattern (hey, it was the ’70s) that would hide any mistakes. I worked on it assiduously for days and days. And I could not get it to look anything like something a human being could wear. I think I must have ripped out every seam at least half a dozen times. I got an F; only my good grades on the cooking part of the class allowed me to pass. Oh, the shame.
This scarred me for years. YEARS. In the last 15 years or so, as I watched various friends learn to knit sweaters, sew dresses, string necklaces, bead earrings, and crochet adorable caps with kitty ears, I contented myself with the thought that since other people made perfectly good clothing and accessories, I really had no need to do it myself. Part of me wanted to be crafty, to put my own handmade stamp on my wardrobe — but the rest of me remembered that humiliating semester in 7th grade and shied away from the very thought.
Then, last week, I was contemplating getting rid of my two favorite sweaters. Both are cashmere/wool blend v-neck pullovers, identical but for color, and they’re the softest, lightest, coziest things I’ve ever worn. But one of them had an unrepairable hole under one arm, and the other had a stain just below the point of the v-neck. I started searching the Internet for ways to salvage them, and lo, I found something I could do with even my minimal domestic skills.
I started with the stained sweater, since it was otherwise intact. I washed it in hot water and dried it on high, which shrank it from boxy to snug and felted the yarn so it wouldn’t unravel if I cut into it. Then I sliced it right down the front, from neck to hem. I stitched on some buttons bought at the local fabric store, snipped small buttonholes (the felting saved me from needing to know how to sew a buttonhole), and voila: a cardigan, with one button conveniently hiding the stain. The buttons are unevenly spaced, and it gaps a little bit unless I leave the top button open, but even though it’s an obviously hand-crafted look, it’s not half as amateurishly ugly as I was afraid it might be.
The next one is going to be a little more challenging. I’m going to cut open both side seams on the body and restitch them shut a little more snugly, thus making the sweater more fitted while hiding the hole under one arm inside a seam. I’m not sure if I want to sew it from the inside to make the seams invisible, or use embroidery floss to make visible stitches on the outside. If I do that, I may have to figure out how to make decorative stitches around the neckline, too, just so it looks planned.
It’s a little intimidating, but I feel like I’m finally laying the ghosts of Home Ec to a long-deserved rest.
Filed under Uncategorized, progress | Comments (2)Spiritual autobiography, part 3
As I’ve noted in the past, I was raised Jewish — though a contradictory flavor of it, to be sure. We kept kosher at home, but not in restaurants. We went to temple on the High Holy Days, but not on weekends. It was made clear to me that I was going to have a Bat Mitzvah whether I wanted one or not; I didn’t, and had to be bribed with an electric typewriter.
(Yes, I sold my soul for a Smith-Corona — though I suspect this says less about the ethical flexibility of a preteen than the undeniable truth that I was doomed to writerdom from an early age.)
I was well into adulthood before I stopped feeling like I had to defend my decision to say Goodbye To All That. I once even got into a screaming fight with a dear friend who, out of heartfelt fondness for a very liberal version of Judaism, told me I had no right to forsake the faith of my forebears until I had sampled every current variety of it and judged them all a bad fit for me. To be fair, we’d been drinking, and each of us said things we regretted. Nonetheless, it ended up being a productive argument for me, because it clarified my realization that I had drifted away from even a mushy nondenominational religiosity into hardcore agnosticism.
Today I finally managed to articulate the reason — well, one reason; there are several — why my ancestral faith never felt like a good fit. Ironically, I found it in an article in a Jewish publication. (Full disclosure: the spouse of someone I know is quoted in this article, and a friend is actually a columnist for the publication, although neither of these facts is terribly relevant.)
In a nutshell, the article explores the discomfort the Modern Orthodox writer feels at going to yoga class, because despite her enjoyment of the exercise, she feels the chanting and bowing make yoga a religion, and she believes that even if it isn’t, it looks like one. And the tenets of Judaism as she observes them require her to avoid not just committing a sin, but avoiding even the appearance of committing a sin.
In other words, even if you have no ill intent, it’s not just what you do — it’s what other people think about what you do. One must be beyond reproach. At all times.
Granted, a more liberal rabbi says later in the article that what matters is intent. But it nailed the pointed problem of my youth: I was taught, in no uncertain terms, that if someone else thinks you’re misbehaving, you are misbehaving, or might as well be — and that the appearance was every bit as important, and maybe more so, than the substance. And that, of course, can be perverted in a multitude of ways.
In an ideal world, being concerned about the judgment of others makes you live a good, ethical life, which is then reflected in your actions. But toss in a dash of narcissism or some other common craziness, and you end up with a thought process that goes something like this: “We can do whatever we want, as long as the actions that are visible to other people make us appear to be good and ethical. In fact, if enough other people perceive us to be good and ethical, we’ll believe it of ourselves, even if our actions behind closed doors are anything but — because if enough other people see and say it, it must be true. And therefore what we’re doing out of the public eye is by definition acceptable, because how could people who are so widely acclaimed as good and ethical do wrong?”
Or, more succinctly, “If we look good, we are good.”
In the end, scary as it is to discuss, I’ve chosen a path that involves living in congruence with what I feel is right, regardless of what other people think. Call it moral relativism, but I continue to believe that spending my time worrying about how I appear to other people is not righteousness, but a fast track to anxiety, neurotic perfectionism, and the sense that every bar I hurdle only leads to a higher bar in an unending quest for unachievable flawlessness.
It may not look good. But it’s good for me.
Filed under fears, progress | Comments (6)