In light of recent election results, I figured it’s time to talk about fear. I’ve spent a good portion of my life afraid of a lot of things. It’s through conversations with other people that I’ve come to this realization, and I’ve come to the realization that I was actually raised this way.
I’d wager a guess that a lot of us were.
I don’t blame my parents for this. They did their level best. We’re all doing our level best… but that doesn’t change the fact that I was raised in this environment. We were a low-income christian family who; on more than one occasion, were cut off at the knees by the church, and when struggling what any atheist might call ‘sour luck’ my folks were told they had sin in their lives that they needed to sort out.
Now, I don’t care if you’re a christian, but if you are you’d probably have a hard time arguing that christianity isn’t entirely based in fear… fear of Hell… fear of Satan… fear of being ‘left behind’… fear of sex… at this point, I’m not completely sure what the selling features of this ideology are, save for the fact that we are all spiritual beings looking for connection and a sense of belonging, and churches advertise their ability to provide these things on billboards.
Okay… back on track… my folks didn’t have much money, and what they did have they were very careful with – to a fault, really. So much so that most opportunities to invest were seen as high-risk. Even clearly good investments, like real estate provided a level of anxiety that I can’t seem to make sense of now as an adult.
This is the tip of the iceberg, but I won’t divulge much more because; again, I don’t blame my parents and I’m not interested in placing myself above them as though I am superior, because I’m not – However, the message that this lifestyle supplanted in my mind at a deep, subconscious level was one of similar fear.
I grew up to be an adult who was ultimately afraid of failure and afraid of success simultaneously. That might sound like a contradiction, but as far as my art goes, it kept me from pushing myself to do bigger and better things because I was:
- afraid to compromise artistically because I might not be happy with the result
- afraid to push my art further because that meant leaving my comfort zone
- afraid to fail, because any failure I might have would probably be public
- afraid to succeed, because if I found success doing something I didn’t love entirely, I’d be stuck doing it anyway
- afraid to commit to any band for a long period of time, because I was constantly starting over at the bottom… where I was comfortable
- afraid to be alone, because the value I put on myself was tied to other peoples’ opinion of me
- afraid to be with people, because of how inferior I felt compared to them
… I could go on like this for days. I trapped myself in a cycle of mediocrity because it was within my comfort zone. Not that the music or the people I was making it with were mediocre, but that my effort to have people hear it was… and these things fizzle out when you don’t try very hard. That’s just how it works.
In the end, I’ve made a conscious decision to not be afraid. At the risk of summing it all up and making it sound simple and easy and quick – it is NOT – I’m not afraid of failure – it’s how I learn, and I’m not afraid of success – because any success is a gift, and it can leave me just as fast as it arrived. Maybe faster.
Really, I choose not to be afraid every day. It gets easier with the momentum of the previous day’s choice.
During the covid times, I stopped mainlining cable news, because it instills fear by constantly showing exceptional situations and telling you they’re normal, when the reason they are newsworthy is because they’re not the norm.
I’m not afraid of Donald Trump.
I wouldn’t have chosen him, but as it turns out, I wasn’t consulted on the matter. I won’t live in fear of the things I can’t control, and who becomes the president of a country I don’t live in is most certainly not something I can control.
What I can do is call out injustice when I see it. I can advocate for people less fortunate than myself. I can use my art to broadcast messages of love and growth. I can challenge the status quo when I see fit. I can support those who need it.
Fear lives in the future, and the future is uncertain.
I live in the present, where there is no fear, and there’s no uncertainty.
There’s just us… doing what we’re doing right now.
So we must act accordingly.
The Conscious Pilgrim 