The Fears That Became Furniture

[ FEAR vs. FREEDOM ]  ·  PART 1 OF 3

Defining my terms, starting with the scary one

“On the other side of fear is freedom.”

I’ve heard some version of that line more times than I can count. It’s on coffee mugs. It’s on posters of some guy standing on a mountain with his arms out and the sun coming up behind him. Nobody seems to know for sure who said it first, and I’m not sure it matters.

What matters is it’s been rattling around in my head for a while. Long enough that I finally wrote it down in my journal and just sat there staring at it.

I understand the deeply profound implication of what it can possibly mean. I get it. Anybody who’s ever done one hard thing gets it. But a slogan is cheap until you make it personal. So here’s what I wrote under it:

I just have to understand what it means to me.

That’s the whole problem right there. Before I can get to the other side of anything, I have to know what I’m standing in front of. I have to define what fear means to me. And I have to define what freedom means, too. Not the poster version. Mine.

So that’s what this little series is. Three posts. This one is fear. The next one is freedom. And the last one is the part the poster leaves out: the space in between, and who you are once you’re standing in it.

A ROUGH DRAFT OF FEAR

I’m not going to give you the textbook definition. You can look that up. Here’s my working one, and I’ll admit up front it’s a rough draft:

Fear, to me, is the voice that sounds like common sense.

That’s what makes it so slippery. Fear almost never kicks the door in yelling “BE AFRAID.” It shows up sounding reasonable. Maybe wait until things settle down. Maybe don’t rock the boat. Maybe now’s not the right time. Doubt and reason look an awful lot alike, especially when the stakes are high.

There’s a reason for that. Deep in your brain is a little almond-shaped alarm whose whole job is spotting threats. It’s old, it’s fast, and it can’t reliably tell the difference between a bear in the woods and somebody laughing at you from the bleachers. Both get the same response. So when fear talks, it borrows the voice of your own good judgment.

A fear you understand is a barometer. It tells you the weather. A fear you don’t understand is a compass, and it’ll happily walk you right off a cliff while telling you it’s keeping you safe.

Most of us have spent a lot of years following a compass we never bothered to check.

THE LITTLE FEARS

Let’s start with the easy ones. The everyday stuff that just gets in the way.

The call you let go to voicemail because you don’t want to hear what’s on the other end. The conversation you keep putting off until “after the holidays.” The email you rewrite eleven times. The thing you don’t try because you might look stupid trying it. The question you don’t ask because everybody else in the room seems to already know the answer.

Little fears are annoying, but they’re honest. You know they’re there. You can feel them in your gut. And most of the time, if you just make the damn call, the little fear folds up like a lawn chair.

Those aren’t the ones I’m worried about.

THE DEEP FEARS

The deep ones are different. They’re the fears we’ve carried with us for so long they’ve become ingrained in our daily lives. So long that, as I wrote in my notebook, we struggle to know ourselves and who we are without them.

A deep fear stops feeling like fear. It starts feeling like personality.

It’s furniture. Think about that ugly recliner that’s been in the same corner of the living room for twenty years. You don’t even see it anymore. You just walk around it. Every single day you adjust your path for it, and you never once stop and ask, why is this thing even here?

I’ll give you one of mine. I was a professional new kid. We moved almost every year when I was growing up, and I stood in front of a brand-new school seven times. Every time, I had to figure out the whole social order from scratch. Who ran things. Who to avoid. Where I might fit. I was desperate to fit in somewhere, and scared to death I wouldn’t.

So I built something. A sarcastic, humor-fueled, gruff demeanor that kept the world at a comfortable distance. Funny guy. Tough guy. Hard to get close to.

For a long time I thought that was just who I was. It wasn’t. It was a scared kid’s furniture, and I’d been walking around it for decades.

That’s how the deep ones work. They don’t look like fear. They look like the jokes you always make. The rules you live by. The backup plan you always keep, so you never have to fully commit to plan A. The cynicism you wear like a tough-guy jacket.

And a lot of them grow from the same root. Most of us aren’t nearly as afraid of failing as we are of not being normal. We’ll take a miserable life that looks right over a happy one that looks weird. That might be the biggest piece of furniture in the whole house.

SIMPLE AND ARDUOUS

In my notes, I called this a simple and arduous task. I stand by both words.

It’s simple because the steps aren’t complicated. You quantify the fear: how big is it, how often does it show up, what is it costing you? You qualify it: what kind of fear is it, where did it come from, whose voice is it using? And then you confront it.

It’s arduous because that last step is the whole job, and it’s the one we skip. Naming a fear isn’t the same as facing it. I can tell you all day long where my gruff-guy routine came from. That doesn’t mean I’ve put it down.

Quantifying and qualifying is the paperwork. Confronting is the work.

But you can’t confront something you’ve stopped seeing. So before anything else, you’ve got to walk through your own house and actually look at the furniture.

YOUR TURN  What’s a fear you’ve had so long you forgot it was a fear?