Fear

Being ruled by fear is a real thing. I’ve no idea how to get past it.

Back in march I wrote about fear and boredom, and in the middle of writing about it I pointed out that I was just vomiting my thoughts onto a page and wasn’t sure if they were an accurate reflection about how I feel.

Turns out, thanks to therapy, that it’s real and is the source of a lot of my problems.

Which is really bloody annoying.

I have friends who have no idea what true, crippling fear really is. They just find a task and go and do it, confident that they can navigate their way around any issues that arise. I am incredibly envious of how they achieve it; my endless frustration is that every new idea I have is instantly subject to the undercurrent of fear that is created by the shitty committee.

To call it an undercurrent isn’t really fair; it’s an overruling edict that determines how much, if any, effort I’ll put into a new task - and in the majority of cases that effort is little or nothing at all.

I’ve always dismissed these tasks as ‘flash in the pan’ events that die out after a couple of weeks, and were just ADHD driven ideas that wilt when not given the attention. That dismissal was essentially accurate - I took on a task, then thought about it, gave the shitty committee time and space to weigh in, and of course the task died on it’s arse after a couple of weeks.

Pruning it was always going to be a natural occurrence. There is no benefit in building a big list of things that I mean to do but end up not doing; each consumes a certain degree of mental energy even when it’s sitting there not being worked on.

What I didn’t realise until recently is that the mental energy was the war between the shitty committee and my own willingness to do something. The committee always won, because I treat it as the final arbiter of worth in any project idea, and because the idea involves effort and risk (even a tiny amount), the shitty committee would shoot it down, allow me to add it to a list, then remind me every time I looked at it that I wasn’t able to finish it and killing the task is the best thing for me to do.

As a recent example; I was very proud of the effort I put into LinkedIn posts every day, and did that for 35 days in a row. That was over two weeks ago, and I haven’t posted since.

It’s not that I couldn’t do it; I’ve already proved to myself that given minimal external prompting, I can produce posts that gradually increase my presence on the platform.

The mistake I made was giving the job of continuing to the everyday task processing part of my brain, considering it a project, allowing the committee the space to weigh in and apply the risk of looking dumb, and essentially killing the idea of ever posting again. Even when I can prove to myself that I can do it.

That’s where the frustration lies.

Thanks to therapy, I can see the influence of the shitty committee in ruining every project, but haven’t yet got to the point where I can comfortably overrule it to allow me to continue doing things that have value, add flexibility and variety to my future, and prove to myself that the work isn’t as scary as it originally seemed.

Fear is the mind killer. Except in this circumstance, the part of my mind that is being killed is the bit that does new things, and not the bit that languishes in the dark, shooting down new ideas, and compounding that lack of progress to fuel the committee using the evidence of it’s own effectiveness to justify listening to it even more.

To say this sounds nuts would be the understatement of the century.

One bonus is instead of wondering what the hell is going on, I can now point at it. Name it. And understand it.

Progress is being made.

Back next week. I hope I can show progress (somewhere, at least).