If you follow this blog at all, you know that we spend a lot of time here looking into those aspects of ourselves and life generally that don’t exactly make for, say, flirty cocktail party talk.
“You seem like a really fun person to know,” a new acquaintance might say to one of us.
“Yeah, I fake that,” might come the rejoinder, “because inside I’m one long muffled scream of anger and insecurities. Have you tried the little toothpicked weenies?”
See? No good. We don’t do small talk, man. Producing The Happy Shiny Show is not our forte.
But what we are good at is starting with who and what we actually are, and then seeing where an honest and careful exploration of that phenomenon takes us. We actually do believe that the biggest thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Which brings me to what I want to talk about today, which is fear.
Literally everything about ourselves about which we feel bad — everything that we feel is wrong or faulty about who or how we are — draws the power of its grip upon us from our singular, deep fear that whatever we’ve done confirms that the worst of what we ever learned about ourselves is true.
If it doesn’t sound too smuggy-bossy, could I ask you to read that again?
That, right there, is the thought that I want to explore. That’s the spot of gold on the ground that I believe leads to the fortune we’re all looking for.
So before we start digging at that spot — before we start mining those riches — I wanted to be sure to take a moment to thoroughly reflect upon and affirm our starting point: That what really gets us about our own manifested faults and weaknesses is our fear that they prove we really are the hopeless, self-defeating screw-ups that we have compelling, deep-rooted reasons to believe we are.
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