Fear

Over the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about what’s been holding me back these last few years. I’ve said in previous posts that I lack confidence, and that’s a big part of why I haven’t been moving forward for a long time. But more than that, I think for a long time I’ve been afraid. Not afraid in the most obvious sense which I think is being afraid to fail and therefore not trying (which is a part of my problem) but I’m talking more about being afraid to succeed. On the surface, it doesn’t seem to make sense to be afraid of success; what is there to fear in achieving something?

I think that if you spend long enough in a situation, even an unpleasant one, you can become comfortable in it. To qualify that, I’m speaking more metaphorically than literally, and there are obviously lots of unpleasant situations that no amount of time could make comfortable. What I mean is, you can adjust your thinking over time so that you become accustomed to and even comfortable in situations that you initially don’t find pleasant. In my opinion, depression falls into this category. When you first experience it it’s no fun, but if enough time goes by it can start to feel familiar and even normal. Over time, your emotional barometer sort of resets and you can’t see a way to feel better and you don’t really know if you want to. You just sort of accept it as part of who you are. At least, that’s sort of what it was like for me. I remember a few years ago, sitting in a psychologist’s office discussing my depression and he asked me if I wanted to feel better. My honest answer to him was, ‘I don’t know’. I really didn’t know. I wanted to want to get better but I didn’t want to get better. I’m not sure where you draw the line between wanting something and wanting to want something but, at that moment, I knew what distinguished the two. I’m not sure I still know what I knew then but I at least understand how conflicted I was feeling.

To get out of an emotional hole you have to believe you can and you also have to believe that you deserve to. The latter is where I was, and am still, struggling: I didn’t feel like I deserved to get better, I felt as if being depressed was punishment – for what I’m not sure – and that I should just accept that I’m not supposed to be happy. Put simply, I just didn’t like myself. I still don’t. Just let me stop myself at this point to say that I didn’t write that in order to get people to feel sorry for me or tell me that I’m a good person, I did it to just put it out there so I can acknowledge it and hopefully move on. I’m not sure how much I’ve changed in the past few years but I think I can upgrade my 'wanting to want to get better' to 'thinking that I want to get better'. There may not even be a difference between those two things but it feels like there is to me and I think that small amount of difference is a step in the right direction - hopefully the first of many.

Getting back to the point I started to make a couple of paragraphs ago, why would someone be afraid of success? Well, once you feel like a failure, it can start to define you. It can erode your feelings of self-worth and how you perceive your abilities but, in a strange way, it can become comfortable and familiar. Once you stop expecting anything of yourself your world becomes safe and predictable. Sure, you’re not happy but the world feels like it makes sense. From this perspective, success is unpredictable because it breeds expectations. If you regard yourself as a failure you know that you are unworthy of those expectations. Make sense? Perhaps it can be better summed up by a joke I remember reading in high school drama: “I hate broccoli. And you know what? I’m glad I hate broccoli because if I liked it I’d have to eat it and I hate the stuff.” If you liked it, you wouldn’t hate it, just as if you succeeded you wouldn’t be a failure. It’s a situation where emotion rules over logic.

Once you feel comfortable where you are, the alternative can seem mysterious and even frightening. If you already feel like you’re at the bottom it would make sense to start climbing back up again except, of course, when you know you’re always going to fall, irrespective of how many times you try. If that’s the case, why even bother?

Please bear in mind that while I’ve felt that way in the past, I don’t feel that way right now, I just felt like writing about it tonight. I’m trying to un-learn a lot of the subconscious negativity that’s been standing in my way. Progress is slow but I think that, little by little, I’m getting there.

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P.S. Happy Australia Day.