Whittling fears down to size

Buckle up for a long-ish post, kids

One strategy for getting through fear is to use specificity to make that damned thing as small as possible. Here’s a story to explain:

I used to hate flying. I did it anyway, but I always was a bucket of anxiety for every take-off and landing and air pocket of turbulence in between. That’s not weird or special; plenty of folks hate to fly.

But, a martial arts teacher/mentor I had gave me a technique to work through it, and it became a super important life-skill right away. She did this by first reflecting to me how big a place I was giving that in my mind and then by having me make a list, with great specificity, of the specific things I didn’t like/feared about flying.

Almost right away, “flying freaks me out; I hate it” turned into “people go Hunger Games at the gate and that pisses me off,” and “I don’t have personal space on the plane,” and “I have no control over my fate or safety,” and those things, my friends, are way, way more specific and manageable things.

Not only did breaking it down give my brain a chance to think of reasonable strategies to address each of those things (“Hang back and board last!” or “Take an early flight that isn’t packed!” or “Request an aisle because I’m tall!” or “Read about safety measures I do have control over on a plane!”) but it also turned one giant monster into smaller, somewhat more manageable monsters. The real core of the fear was about not having any control over my fate while hurdling through the air in a tin can. But, boarding and giving myself a pep talk about that was far different than trying to ratchet it down from the huge and unmanageable “flying freaks me out and I hate it” starting point.

Which is all a long story simply to say: plenty of talented people are stuck in a loop of fear and never write anything. And that entirely sucks for them and for those of us who never get to read their work. If breaking down the fear around writing and publishing into bite-sized pieces is helpful and gets you un-stuck, then I encourage you to steal the hell out of this strategy and make it yours. Don’t leave yourself stranded at the intersection of “I’m scared to send my manuscript out” and “everyone’s going to laugh at this”... but break it down into the elements and the whys and see what that opens up for you.