“If you can’t beat the fear, just do it scared,” Glennon Doyle.  This is an old one but it seemed important to bring it back now.  It’s not surprising at this stage in my life, there are a ton of changes happening and I’m in the throes of documenting some of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever had to speak about on top of reconciling changes in nearly every relationship I have at the moment, a new job, and construction in my home—it’s 100% chaos right now and every choice feels like it’s blurred/clouded.  Nothing is straightforward at the moment.  The truth is that I AM scared right now because these changes encompass everything from mortality to shifting life paths, creativity and purpose, power and struggle, and identity and the mask.  Everything is exposed, it’s all on the table (and in the case of my home quite literally all on the floor) and there are parts of me that I thought I could never live without that I don’t have a say in whether or not I get to keep it.  And I know that’s natural, that is the definition of life: change and evolution. I started to struggle with analysis paralysis and decision fatigue and realized that the first issue was that I was/am overstimulated and that makes it hard for anyone to think straight.  We know the universe sends us signs and for me it was hearing this quote again used in the context of a speech Ryan Leak was giving and it reminded me of what I say: when you don’t know what to do, do nothing until you can do SOMETHING.

Ryan expounded on this concept when he said, “Who’s to say you can’t be scared and still do it nervous?.”  If we continue to do nothing then nothing will ever get done and we will find ourselves in the same position for as long as we sit there—unicursal path or not, if we don’t move, we certainly won’t get anywhere.  Fear isn’t the deterrent, it’s our inability to get past it.  For me it’s ultimately the fact that I don’t want to look back and wish I had done something differently or to realize that I missed out on what I was supposed to do.  I also watched some videos of high divers/cliff divers and couldn’t fathom the idea of willingly jumping off of something to plunge into the water.  The height is terrifying but they still do it—the still find the courage to launch their bodies off whatever platform they are on and hit the water.  I realized that, even though I’m not jumping from 30-60 feet, the feeling of change is similar: we’re jumping off the edge of what we’ve known into something we can’t quite see the other side of.  There comes a point where you can’t go back and I heard in one of these videos that it was bad luck in diving to turn back once they were on the platform—so for us, once we are at that point, there truly is no turning back.  And that’s ok because if we are going to end up where we need to be then the concept is the leap was part of the journey all along.

There’s always the before and after—what it was like before we did this thing and then after.  What it was like with this person and then what it’s like in their absence.  What it was like at this job and then in a new job.  There is no way we can ever prepare for every single variable that occurs when we face a new challenge.  If we were required to do that, literally everything would stop because we wouldn’t be able to handle more complex issues than yes or no and, frankly, every decision would feel like life or death.  With that being said, the reality that we will have to do things while we are scared takes on a different look.  All we can do is prepare for what we know, for what we think may happen, and plan for what we want so we can somehow connect the two and close the gap between that before and after.  Sometimes the chaos is too much, sometimes there is too much change at once and it feels like we’re going to drown.  In those moments it is fully acceptable to stop fighting and try to float to gather our bearings.  But once we right ourselves again, we have to keep going.  It’s all part of the process.  It’s 100% true that once we take that leap we so often see it wasn’t as scary as we thought it was and part of life is figuring it out along the way.  Even if we are scared, we have to do it anyway because the alternative is looking back and wishing we had and not being able to do anything about it.  Change is a gift because it means we are alive and the truth is we have made living pretty scary sometimes.  It doesn’t have to be and even if we are afraid, life still moves forward so we may as well make the choice to leap when we want to.