An excerpt from Happy Motherfucker — a survival guide to getting your shit together and staying that way
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In a small town, you play sports. That's just how it works. If you can identify all your limbs and demonstrate basic coordination, someone is putting you on a team. The social cost of not playing was higher than the misery of playing badly, so you played.
Baseball was my particular form of manageable torture. Specifically, batting.
The anticipation of standing at the plate was, for me, a special kind of hell. The pitcher winding up. The ball coming. The split-second window to decide whether to swing and where and how hard — with a full set of bleachers a few feet away. Half of them cheering for you. Half of them waiting for you to fail. All of them watching.
The fear was so physical, so immediate, so completely overwhelming that I developed a coping mechanism that was both completely understandable and absolutely useless: I closed my eyes.
I would stand at that plate, bat up, and wait for the fear to pass. Eyes shut. Just enduring it. Waiting for the moment to be over.
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The Thing About Closed Eyes
I was not afraid of the ball. I knew what to do — I'd practiced it, I understood the mechanics. What I was afraid of was swinging and missing in front of everyone. Trying and failing, publicly, where it couldn't be hidden or explained away.
At some point my brain had done the math and decided that not trying was less painful than trying and coming up short.
It isn't. It never is.
But fear math is not real math. It's a calculation made by a part of your brain that weights the pain of visible failure much higher than the cost of invisible non-trying. Standing there with your eyes closed feels like protection. What it actually is, is surrender in slow motion.
I did this in baseball. I also did it in relationships. In my career at certain critical junctions. With opportunities that deserved a real swing and instead got a guy standing there with his eyes closed, waiting for the moment to be over.
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What Fear Is Actually Doing
Here's what's happening in your brain when fear shows up dressed as caution: deep in the amygdala — the part of your brain responsible for threat detection — a signal fires that redirects blood flow, elevates your heart rate, and takes the rational thinking parts of your brain more or less offline. The psychologist Daniel Goleman called it the amygdala hijack. Your emotional brain overrides your thinking brain.
And here's the part nobody tells you: your brain cannot reliably distinguish between a physical threat and a social one. The possibility of a bear eating you and the possibility of swinging and missing in front of people — your nervous system processes both as danger. Same response. Same closed eyes.
Which means when fear feels like logic — when the very reasonable-sounding voice in your head is laying out all the sensible reasons why you shouldn't take the swing — that voice is not your rational mind at its clearest. That's just the amygdala doing its job. Its job is keeping you safe, which it defines extremely broadly to include keeping you safe from anything uncertain or uncomfortable or potentially embarrassing.
It kept your ancestors alive. It is also, at this particular moment in your life, keeping you from the things worth having.
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Open Your Eyes
The times I finally opened my eyes and swung — even when I missed, especially when I missed — were the times I actually learned something. Were the times I found out what I was capable of. Were the times I got to be a person actually participating in his own life rather than just enduring it from a safe distance.
Fear doesn't go away when you open your eyes. The pitcher is still winding up. The bleachers are still watching. The possibility of failure is still completely real.
You just stop letting the fear make the decision for you.
That's the whole thing. Not the absence of fear. The refusal to let it steer.
Open your eyes. Step up to the plate. Take the swing.
Even if you miss. Especially if you miss.
That's how you find out what you're made of.
Happy Motherfucker is a book in progress — a survival guide for men navigating the wreckage of the life they thought they were building. More excerpts here regularly. If this landed, share it with the guy who needs it.