Doing It Afraid

One of them was small, younger than the fears I was carrying, and she stood at the edge of something she badly wanted to do and badly did not want to do, and she did it anyway. Her voice shook. Her hands shook. She went ahead. I watched her and felt something turn over in me, because I realised I was asking her for a kind of courage I was not giving myself.

At that time I kept a private list. Not written down, but I could have recited it: the things I was avoiding. Being on camera. Speaking in front of a room. The difficult conversations with people I cared about, the ones I kept rescheduling in my head. I had built a whole professional life and still kept a careful distance from the things that frightened me, telling myself I would do them when I felt ready.

The truth is I was never going to feel ready. That is not how fear works.

We are sold a particular story about courage, that one day the fear lifts, and then you act. I have not found that day. What I have found is something less cinematic and more useful: you can be afraid and move at the same time. The fear comes along. It just doesn’t get to drive.

I began small. I let someone film me and did not delete it. I said the thing in the meeting I would normally have swallowed. I had one of the conversations I had been avoiding for a year, and it was every bit as uncomfortable as I feared, and I survived it, and something eased.

I want to be careful not to make this sound like a triumph. It wasn’t a single brave leap. It was, and still is, a practice: a daily decision to let the fear be present without letting it be in charge. Some days I do it well. Some days the fear wins and I put the thing off again, and I forgive myself, and I try again.

What made the difference was not becoming fearless. It was watching my daughter, and deciding that if I was going to ask her to be brave, I had no honest choice but to be brave too. Courage, it turns out, is often borrowed before it is owned. She lent me some of hers.

So this is not a story about conquering fear. It is a story about walking with it, about learning that “afraid” and “anyway” can share a sentence.

What would you do next, if fear was allowed to come along with you, but not allowed to lead?