This Fear…

One of the things that I have dealt with in my life has always been fear.

Fear is a stupid word. It can completely overtake your life if you are not brave enough.

In today’s context, fear has to do with the unknown. The unknown of getting a new job that I can financially support myself on. The unknown of self-improvement. Can I do everything that I want to do?

My boyfriend has a nice point of view on life. GET A HOBBY. It can be the stupidest hobby in the world. You can spray paint googly eyes and glue them on T-shirts.* I did not encourage myself for hobbies. I used to have hobbies but I lost them. Sounds silly but it is not the physical items that were lost, but it was a result of a time in my life where having a hobby meant getting a lower grade on an exam. There was no time to do the stuff that I wanted to do. Over time, my hobby became procrastination and procrastination was watching TV.

So I have come to the dumbest conclusion ever: I am scared to find a hobby I like. In some ways having a hobby meant failure in my past.

I listen to a podcast called “How I Built This.” It’s about how entrepreneurs started their businesses up from an idea. Not all of them believed that their idea would be a big deal, but a good amount of them did. For some, it started off as a hobby. For others, they knew that their idea was going to be huge. My boyfriend has told me that one should not aspire to do something because they should, but because they want to- gives them happiness. Truly words of wisdom. But there is this part of me that doesn’t believe it. It wants to say, “How the hell is buying googly eyes, spray painting over them and sticking them on T-shirts is gonna make any money at all?! Don’t waste your time!” But the point is not to make money, but to be happy. Some day, I would like to be the boss of something. I would like to be a boss of a company or boss of a signature idea. I just want to leave something behind that people might enjoy or make people happy. Society does not appreciate all types of artistic visions. That is a very disheartening thing to hear. There will always be critics. There will always be people who say that you are an idiot. A nightmare indeed. My ideas WANT to be bigger than myself. They CRAVE to be bigger than myself. It is not a matter of doing something only for myself. My brain wants to do something for somebody and then get the recognition that it deserves for that same thing. Something that somebody said that I mattered in some way. It seems like a negative point of view doesn’t it? It doesn’t seem right. But that’s my unique brain.

So what does this all mean? If we go back to the idea of fear, it means that fear of failure is inevitable no matter what I do. But it matters WHY I do something. If I do it to be happy, then I will succeed. If I do it to gain recognition then I will fail. But how do I change my mind to get around all of this bullshit?

Unfortunately, it is a simple answer: Just do it and see what happens.

There are a million things that I can do in this world. The world will always say that I will not have enough experience on my resume, the world will tell me that my name is hard to pronounce, the world will tell me that I look unattractive and unhealthy, the world will tell me that I am not coherent or smart enough to understand many things, the world will break my heart in two – but as long as I am doing something that matters, with the utmost passion I can put into it, then I will have a place where I can live with no regrets, no sadness, no more failed New Year’s Resolutions and no more fear…

Look down and you will only see the ground. Look up and you will see the changing sky.

I want to look up.

 

*Example of a totally useless, totally unique hobby someone other than me might enjoy.