Fear doesn't get to make up our minds for us.
Instead, we can listen to our fear and learn from it.
Hi, writer dear.
Welcome to our first emotional support letter. We might as well kick things off with a big one: fear.
In my experience, and also the experience of a lot of writers I know, and also writers I hear on podcasts, fear shapeshifts. It doesn’t go away, at least not for long. Even when we face our fear (which is badass of us!), another new scary thing always pops up.
I could (and maybe will) tell you so many stories about when/how writing has scared me. It’s an emotional experience that I’ve learned to live with as a writer, and—if you haven’t already—I hope to help you do the same.
But! I’m starting with a time when I didn’t know yet how to live with my fear: my junior year in college, when a popular professor taught her bi-annual creative writing class. It was a much-anticipated thing. If memory serves, it was workshop-based and, as long as you really gave it your all, you’d get an A for the semester.
It would’ve been unlike anything I’d ever done before. As an English major, I took more literature than writing classes; I’d known since third grade that I wanted to be a writer, but the older I got, the more unsure of myself I became. This creative writing class sounded inspiring and life-changing and entirely out of my league. I didn’t register for it.
Because I was scared. Of, among other things:
Everyone being better than me;
Being criticized, or laughed at, or excluded;
Trying, only for it to be absolutely terrible, and then never wanting to write again.
I wonder how much I consciously recognized the sources of my fear at the time. I suspect that, when I imagined taking the class, I felt such strong physical sensations of fear that I simply stopped considering it on the spot.
Ugh, but what if I had taken some deep breaths, given myself a few pep talks, and registered? How different might my life have been? Would I have started submitting to literary journals and media outlets years earlier? Would I have gotten a writing-related Masters? Would I be a Super Successful Writer right now?1
I obviously don’t know what would have happened if I’d taken that class. I don’t know if not taking it was a mistake, or if it’s a moot point, or what. But that’s not why I told you the story. I told you because, when I think of College Kerry, I wish she’d known how to pay closer attention to her fear.
She didn’t know she could sit with fear to feel where it lives in her body. She hadn’t considered reflecting more specifically about why she was afraid. She would never dream of striking up a conversation with her fear itself, asking what it was trying to preserve on her behalf.
If she had, College Kerry would have, if nothing else, understood her fear better. Maybe the fear would’ve stayed as strong as ever, and maybe she still would’ve decided not to take the creative writing class. But she would have at least felt more informed about what was happening in her own mind, heart, body. And, ideally, that insight would have served her.
It’s been 20ish years since that semester—since I didn’t register for a class because I let fear make up my mind for me. Thankfully, since then, I’ve learned that we have more than two choices when responding to fear.
We can oblige our fear.
We can conquer our fear.
And we can sit with our fear, really listen to what it’s saying, and why. We can take the time to examine how reasonable or overprotective it feels. We can make a plan that feels right to us about how to interact with fear.
Tell me: how have you been choosing to respond to your writing-related fear(s)? Which choice do you typically make? How right do those choices feel?2
You’re creative and wise and important. Thank you for being a writer, and thank you for being a reader of Writer Dear.
~Kerry
Yeah, yeah, I also could’ve registered for the class just to drop it, or had one person say one brutal thing to me, thus making me shut the door on writing forever—but my mind tends to only see awful things in an imagined future and awesome things in an imagined past.
I 100% want to know your answer! No pressure, but if you feel comfortable sharing, you can either comment on this post (which means everyone will see it), or reply to this email (which will keep it between me and you).
I can so relate to this post. I have several regrets of things I wanted to do but chickened out. Some from years ago, some recent. You'd think I'd get braver and wiser with age.