On the Other Side of Fear

In January of 2008, I left the States with a one-way ticket to Costa Rica. My best friend and I had been planning an extensive trip around the globe and had been saving for years from our waitressing jobs at an iconic diner in NW Portland. Several months before our departure, she admitted she wasn’t in a place in her life to make the trip with me.

Alarmed and devastated, I shifted sights to my then-boyfriend who I thought might join me in her place. While at first there was interest, he soon admitted he wasn’t up for the trip either — he had a job that he loved and didn’t have the savings to support the adventure.

Canceling was not an option. I had been planning and talking about this trip for so long that it had become a core part of my identity. But despite my abject fear and hesitation, something inside me still urged me to go. In some ways I think I was relieved my boyfriend declined the offer to join.

We both knew this was my journey, my dream.

I was compelled by the belief the world had more to offer me, and I wanted to find whatever it was that was pulling me out of Portland.

My trip was indefinite — I had fantasies of meeting someone along my travels that would whisk me away to a new life in another country. I had hopes of taking a random job in a foreign land, making a home somewhere far from the Pacific Northwest. So while we were still in love and had been living together, with no intention of returning, it was only fair to break up before I left.

Armed with an iPod full of love songs he’d loaded up and a hand-written letter sealed in an envelope, we said our goodbyes to one another.

And so I left for my trip. Alone, and terrified out of my fucking mind.

It was 9 months before I came back to Portland.

In 2012, I left a 5 year relationship that had run its course (Yes, the same partner I left for my adventure). We lived together, had adopted a dog together, and I was enmeshed in his family’s life in ways that felt impossible to untangle. I was on the family phone plan and car insurance, I brunched with and took exercise classes with his mother regularly, and she routinely introduced me as her daughter-in-law. Although we were not yet engaged, eventual marriage was a given.

My boyfriend and I had grown apart and were in drastically different eras of our lives — I was barely keeping my head above water in grad school and he was working and making a music video for his friends’ band.

It’d been over a year since things were good, and efforts to repair or end the relationship were falling on deaf ears.

There was a fizzy black, sinking sensation in my chest when I accepted that this would be my life. It felt like someone had tied a knot at the end of a string and strung it through my chest, and I was getting pulled down and backwards through my own body. But instead of hitting the ground, I was freefalling into an infinite abyss inside myself, a black hole, but contained inside my own body, invisible to everyone else.

We would get married.

I would be miserable.

I wondered how things ended up this way. How had I ended up so powerless?

He didn’t want to break up, so he left me no choice.

I told him I was moving out, and blew up my life.

I was the girl that was never going to get married. I had fractured beliefs about love and trust and lacked the confidence in myself that I could love and lose, and survive that loss once I let someone in.

My mother’s marriage was more or less arranged — she was betrothed to my father, a doctor from a “good family.” By my mother’s account, she was never in love with him, and his philandering ways led her to leave him not once, but twice. They parted ways when I was three years old, officially divorced when I was 7, and my father never took interest in sharing custody of me.

He stopped paying child support the moment I turned 18.

“Never get married. Never have children” my mother once said to me while still in my youth. It felt more like a dirty secret, a folded up note she wished she could have passed to her younger self, not something said offhand to her own daughter.

In my 30’s, she asked if I’d have children. I repeated her very words back to her, and she had no recollection of what she had said to me.

Be careful what you say to your children.

Her warning had wormed into the recesses of my teenage mind and laid a sturdy foundation. They’d cast a long shadow, knee-capping my ability to love and trust another human.

I’ve spent decades trying to step out from that darkness.

Then I met my husband — online through OK Cupid, when internet dating was still pretty fringe and something to be feared. But we fell in love quickly. It was as if we had known each other forever, but at the same time filling a void in one another left open from crucial gaps in parenting.

We were engaged 4 months after we met. We got married weeks after our one year anniversary.

Letting someone in like this went against every instinct I had developed in my 31 years on this earth. My mother’s words lingered. My general mistrust of men permeated every facet of life. A four alarm fire raged inside me, my mind throwing red flags in every direction, desperately trying to get me to change course.

But something kept me there. I had my concerns — of course I did, as did my friends — but I somehow trusted I was doing the right thing.

Or at the very least, I had finally learned to trust myself that I would be able to survive the outcome if things went south.

None of these choices were easy or elegant. All of them were tumultuous in their own unique ways.

I spent the first 48 hours of my solo backpacking trip sobbing uncontrollably — on the plane clutching the letter, soggy from tears and listening to the iPod, or locked in my lodging in San Jose, paralyzed by what I had just embarked on. I had a happy home and boyfriend and wonderful friends in Portland — why did I feel the need to turn my life upside down?

When I left my 5 year relationship, I lost all of my friends in the aftermath. I’ll be the first to admit my departure was callous. We still continued to live together for several weeks after the breakup until my next apartment was ready and my happiness and relief from being free from the relationship was effusive. Some nights I didn’t come home.

I get why it was easy to hate me at that time. Our mutual friends sympathized with him who felt blindsided by the breakup, while I was beyond hurt that my friends — despite knowing how unhappy I was — saw me as the one doing all the wrong.

Early days of our marriage, some of the fights with my husband felt insurmountable. Two years in, we were still learning about each other — our habits and belief systems that differed gravely, and were things that would have been grounds for a breakup.

But we were already married.

What had I done?

While these experiences rattled my life in ways I never expected, what has resulted each time is a deepening trust in myself that I can do hard things.

I didn’t do these things bravely.

But I did them, eventually.

And while many parts were extremely unpleasant, I’m still here, and don’t regret any of the choices I made. I’d clean up the ways I executed some of them, but the outcomes would be the same.

I share this because my current fear is sharing my writing. Maybe it’s just a part of aging, but I can’t help but laugh that the thing striking fear and hesitation in my heart does not require flipping my life upside down, losing my friends or leaving the country, and yet it’s scaring the shit out of me.

For three years I paid for various domains and empty or half-cocked websites that sat unused. The urge to write simmered inconveniently in the background. Any time I read anything — a restaurant review, a novel, an op-ed, I felt myself bubble with envy and awe at the prose and deliciously descriptive words produced by the writer.

I can only imagine the look on my face when my mind wanders to the version of myself where I write full time. But my logical brain is an all-time MVP at smothering these petulant ideas, reminding me how unrealistic this life would be.

But then there she is, my child-self, tugging at my sleeve and begging me not to forget how much I love to write, have always loved to write. That it’s not too late, and I’m not too old, and just because there are so many talented writers in the world, it doesn’t mean I don’t get to try.

She has more kindness and patience for me than I do. I’m working diligently on letting her voice drown out my own — mine is doing me few favors lately.

I’ve been writing with regularity for the last year and a half. And yet, despite the enormous amount of time and energy dedicated to the writing, editing, struggling through website design and photography during travels, I remain pretty hush hush about my “personal project.”

I am terrified that my coworkers will discover my writing and giggle behind my back, or worse, find it sad and pathetic.

Turns out it’s actually the biggest fear holding me back.

I admit that I go so far as to hide my writing, if I’m being honest. People ask what I’m doing on my computer during my lunches and I say something elusive like, “taking care of business.” When I’m asked about my weekend, instead of admitting I was wading through the hell of redesigning my website, I just don’t mention it because I don’t want them to ask what my website is about.

But the reality is that my colleagues either don’t or won’t give two shits about what I’m doing, or will continue to be blissfully unaware of my writing.

And I’ll have no one to blame but myself if I don’t share my writing because I’m afraid that someone I share a workspace with might have a fleeting thought that my efforts are lame.

I can’t let other people have that much power over me. I am so infuriatingly aware that our world would be insufferable without variety and range — it’s what makes our lives worth living.

And yet here I am, stifling my own voice, insecure that there isn’t room for me.

But just like the younger versions of me, I can see myself on the other side of the fear. That me has found her voice and has been writing through her fear, letting it be a relatable part of her identity. Her self-doubt humanizes her, but she’s still moving forward with some level of confidence that she has something worth saying, that there is room in this world for her.

It’s not all going to be good. Not at all.

But, at least, statistically, it can’t all be bad?

Here’s hoping.