The Paradox of Fear
I have always known I was afraid.
When I was a kid, my fear felt very loud and obvious. I was terrified of very specific things. Someone breaking into the house. One of my parents dying. Getting sick. I would lie awake at night after everyone else had fallen asleep, staring at the ceiling, fully alert and bracing myself for the inevitable attacker I had convinced myself would come through the back door. In my mind, it did not feel like a possibility. It felt like a probability.
Most of my fears back then felt external. They were things that seemed completely outside of my control, even though I desperately tried to convince myself otherwise.
I prayed every single night as a kid, but most of the time I was praying out of fear. I do not even know where that belief came from because no one ever taught me that God worked that way. But somewhere along the line, I became convinced that if I prayed correctly, everything would be okay. And if I missed a night, forgot something, or worded a prayer the “wrong” way, then something bad would happen.
Looking back, I think it was my child brain trying to create a sense of control over fears that were never mine to control in the first place.
As I got older, though, the fear became quieter and harder to recognize for what it really was. It stopped presenting itself as fear and started disguising itself as practicality. Responsibility. Preparedness.
The fears also turned inward. They became less about intruders, sickness, or disasters and more about myself. Fear of disappointing people. Fear of embarrassing myself. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of not being able to handle the consequences if things fell apart.
I realized that I did not just think about what was likely to happen. I fixated on the things that had the smallest chance of happening and treated them like outcomes I needed to prepare for. My brain would take a 0.1% possibility and spiral it into a full-blown emergency.
And maybe that is why fear has kept me stuck more often than it has protected me.
There have been so many moments in my life where I convinced myself I needed to be more prepared first. More qualified. More certain. More ready. I stayed in the discomfort of the known because at least it was familiar. Even when I was unhappy, there was comfort in knowing what to expect. Stepping outside of that felt dangerous.
Sometimes I wonder how much I have missed out on because of that mindset. How many opportunities, relationships, experiences, or versions of myself never fully materialized because fear convinced me to wait until I felt completely ready.
And the truth is, if I had waited until I felt fully ready to get a dog, I never would have Olive.
There would always have been another reason to wait. More money to save. More stability to create. More certainty to reach first. But life does not really work that way. Some of the best and most meaningful parts of life happen before you feel fully prepared for them.
No one is ever fully ready for a major life change. No one reaches a point where fear disappears and certainty takes over. Most people move forward while scared and figure things out as they go.
I, on the other hand, often let the fear of embarrassment, disappointment, failure, or making an irreversible choice convince me to do nothing at all. And while the world kept moving around me, I stayed the same.
Lately, I have started waking up to how much of my life has been shaped by this pattern, and I do not want to live there anymore. I have spent too many years exhausting myself over possibilities that never happened.
Yes, anything is possible. But not every possibility deserves equal attention.
My brain has a way of imagining every possible outcome and then fixating almost exclusively on the worst ones. It scans constantly for danger, problems, regret, rejection, catastrophe. It treats uncertainty like a threat that needs to be solved immediately. And it is exhausting, not just for me, but probably for the people around me too.
The irony is that my brain believes it is protecting me. That all of this overthinking and hypervigilance is somehow keeping me safe. But in so many ways, it has hurt me more than reality ever has.
The fear tries to save me from pain, yet it often becomes the very thing causing it.
