Fear and writing

I've had to think a bit about fear the last few days. Fear is one of those emotions that go with life. We like to say things like "No Fear" or "Be Fearless", but the reality is that if we try to do something we will experience fear. We don't even need danger to feel fear. Thinking about the unknown, worrying about the worst case, or just imagining something is enough to make us fearful. I will confess that I let fear run things too much. Well, perhaps it's more accurate to say that I let fear stop things from being attempted too much. But even when I try something fear will step in to make me doubt my action.

Thursday I sent an email to someone influential in my field about doing something with him. I have some connections to this person and even met him once or twice. I believe I'll eventually get a conversation going with him about it, but it will take some work on my part and maybe help from some friends. But man, my fear has been raging ever since I sent that email. So far I haven't received a reply email, so that inner voice is screaming at me about what I did. I won't bore you with what it's saying, but it can be kind of ugly.

The decision to publicly say that I'm going to write Mack Hawthorne inspired a great deal of fear. I've never written a book before, so I have no idea what I will run into or how this works. I'm afraid that it won't be very good, since it is my first novel. I'm afraid people won't like it. I'm afraid I'll give up and not finish. I feel a certain apprehension about these blog posts, since I committed to writing a post every day for 90 days. (I think this is day 58!) My fears around the book come with the companion fear of guilt because I don't write every day and I think I should be at least writing a little bit most days of the week.

I don't think I'll ever be without fear. Some fears get quieter with experience. They have less power because I have experiences that act as evidence against it. When I try something new, fear finds a new point of attack against me. The only thing that I've found that helps is to act anyway, to be stubborn in that action, and to try to tell my inner voice to shut up and go sit in the corner. The voice is pretty disobedient, so I have to push through it. Too often I have let it win and quit something. Or not even tried.

A big component of writing Mack Hawthorne is about facing fear and working towards a dream. I have no idea how it will work out and it's almost certain that it will happen in ways that I won't expect. But I will have tried. It will be a good story.

Fear sucks, but I think trying to avoid it has hurt me far worse. I am confronting it to see what will happen. It's not like I'm doing something actually dangerous. I'm just daring to chase a dream.

Thanks for being my accountability buddies.