✦ Prefer to listen?
Let Human Glimmer read this one to you.
Imagine you’re about to walk onto a stage in front of a room full of people. You’ve prepared for this. You know what you’re supposed to say, you’ve probably gone over it more times than you needed to, and realistically, you know you’re going to be fine. Even if you stumble over a word or lose your train of thought for a second, nothing terrible is going to happen.
Your body doesn’t seem particularly interested in any of that. Your heart is pounding, your palms are sweating, your stomach is doing whatever awful thing stomachs do when we’re nervous, and suddenly your brain can think of plenty of reasons why maybe you shouldn’t walk onto that stage. You know you’re safe, but you’re afraid anyway.
That’s not the strange part. Fear doesn’t always require actual danger, and most of us know what it’s like to be afraid of something we also know probably isn’t going to hurt us. What I find more interesting is how quickly we can go from feeling afraid to deciding that fear must mean something. I’m scared becomes maybe I shouldn’t do this, and sometimes that’s where the decision ends.
That doesn’t mean ignoring fear is the better option. There are plenty of times when fear is giving us information we should probably listen to. If a car swerves into your lane, you don’t need to stop and examine why that scared you. You need to react. If a dog is growling at you with a stiff body and making it very clear that it wants you to back off, backing off is a good idea.
The problem isn’t that we listen to fear. Fear can be useful. What I keep coming back to is how easily listening to fear can become obeying it, even when we aren’t actually in danger. Being afraid starts to feel like evidence all by itself, and we don’t always stop to question whether the thing we’re afraid of should actually determine what we do.
Think about something you’ve wanted to do but were afraid to do. Maybe you wanted to apply for something, share something you created, or make a change you’ve been thinking about for a long time. There are a hundred different versions of this, but let’s say the fear underneath yours is that people might judge you.
Okay, but why does that scare you?
Maybe you care what people think of you. Most of us probably do. But if you keep following the question, it can start going somewhere you didn’t expect. What happens if they don’t think well of you? What are you afraid their judgment would mean?
Maybe you’re afraid they’ll think you aren’t good enough because deep down some part of you already worries that you aren’t. You might be afraid of looking stupid or of people seeing you differently. Maybe failing privately feels manageable, but failing where everyone can see it feels completely different.
Or maybe it’s something else entirely. That’s kind of the point.
I tend to think fear can be a beacon like that. It can highlight things we haven’t completely dealt with, beliefs we have about ourselves, or things that matter more to us than we realized. That doesn’t mean every fear has some deep unresolved meaning hiding underneath it. Sometimes a growling dog is just a growling dog. But fear isn’t always trying to tell us to stay away from something. Sometimes it draws our attention to something we haven’t fully understood yet.
And that doesn’t always mean there’s something inside ourselves that needs to be understood. Sometimes we simply don’t understand the thing we’re afraid of.
Take someone who had a bad experience with a dog and is now terrified of them. If they don’t know much about how dogs behave, every dog can start to feel unpredictable. Barking is scary, growling is scary, and a dog running toward them is definitely scary. Even an excited dog can look threatening when they don’t know what they’re looking at.
But what if they decide to study dog behavior? They start to recognize the difference between a dog that’s excited, one that’s anxious, and one that’s afraid. They understand more about what different behaviors mean and which ones are actually warning signs. The bad experience doesn’t change, but now they have a better understanding of what to look for. Awareness changes their perspective.
I think a lot of our fears can work this way. Sometimes understanding the situation changes the way we see it, and sometimes understanding our own reaction does. Either way, we have more information to make a decision with. Instead of stopping at I’m afraid, we can ask what we’re actually afraid will happen, what we know about the situation, and whether there’s something we still don’t understand. We can even ask why a particular outcome bothers us as much as it does.
The answers may not make the fear disappear, but they can help us understand what we’re actually dealing with. And that matters, because understanding fear and no longer feeling it are two very different things.
You can understand exactly why you’re nervous about getting on that stage and still feel like you might throw up five minutes before you do it. Eventually, there may not be another question to ask or another thing to learn. You have the information you have, you’re still scared, and now you have to decide what you’re going to do with that.
Maybe you walk onto the stage anyway. Your voice shakes a little and you stumble over something, but you get through it. The next time you have to do it, your body might still react, but now you have an experience you didn’t have before. You know what it feels like to stand there while you’re nervous and keep speaking anyway.
That experience can change the fear even if it doesn’t get rid of it. Maybe you’re a little less afraid the next time, or maybe eventually the fear disappears altogether. Maybe you’re always a little nervous before speaking in front of people, but being nervous no longer determines whether you’ll do it.
Of course, sometimes experience teaches you something else entirely because the thing you were afraid of actually happens. You put yourself out there and someone judges you. You try something and fail at it. You embarrass yourself.
So what?
I don’t mean that those things can’t hurt. They can. But things don’t always go the way we want them to. Someone thinking poorly of you doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t have spoken, just like failing at something doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t have tried. Sometimes the thing you were afraid of happens, and you deal with it.
Fear coming true doesn’t automatically mean the fear was right.
Maybe avoiding the situation would have saved you from being embarrassed, rejected, or disappointed, but it also would have meant never trying. Fear only gets to argue for what might go wrong. It doesn’t know what you might gain, what you might learn, or what could happen if you try anyway.
And I think that’s where fear can quietly become much more powerful than we realize. One decision made because you were afraid probably isn’t going to shape your entire life. But what happens when fear gets to make those decisions over and over again?
You don’t say what you want to say because you’re afraid of the response. You don’t try something because you might be bad at it. You don’t let yourself be seen because someone might judge you, and you don’t make the change because you don’t know what comes afterward. None of those decisions looks enormous on its own, but after enough of them, how much of your life did you actually choose, and how much of it was chosen by what you were afraid of?
I’m not sure the answer is to stop listening to fear, or that it would even be possible. I definitely don’t think it would be wise. Fear gets to speak because sometimes it has very important things to say. It just shouldn’t automatically get to decide.
For some people, I know it isn’t as simple as stopping for a moment and asking a few questions. Fear can become persistent and overwhelming enough that questioning it feels impossible, and sometimes figuring out how to work with it takes support. Awareness doesn’t always have to be something you find on your own.
But wherever you are with fear, I think there’s value in getting curious about it before automatically giving it the answer. Maybe the answer really is no. Maybe something isn’t safe, you need more information, or you simply aren’t ready yet.
Or maybe you’re just scared, and you can still say yes.
✦ Closing Glimmer
Fear can tell you what might go wrong. It can’t tell you what might go right. That part, you have to find out for yourself.