Fear Inventories
How to Make A Decision is our workshop for March. We’ll be doing shadow work and energy work together, and you’ll be asked to change a narrative or two about yourself . Sign up here.
"What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it." —Jiddu Krishnamurti
Recently, a friend and I were going through some of our fear inventories: what scares us and what stops us. We realized that one of the biggest fears we both had was that nothing would change at all.
Humans are funny that way. We want change, but not change we don’t choose.
We want change, but only “good” change, even though it’s the harder stuff that usually leads to true breakthroughs and shows us who we are. We don’t feel like any change is happening, but seeds planted underground bloom into flowers eventually, and what used to keep us up at night sweating is now only a memory.
We wait until we feel safe enough, or ready enough to initiate change, even though waiting is the surest way to collect dust and betray the universe. It’s not about getting ready, it’s about getting started.
Fear, shame, and perfectionism create the strongest excuses. The mind dresses this unholy trinity up as iron-clad reasons not to go forth, not to try, not to bet on yourself. Sometimes, we don’t even know we are doing it! We just reflexively say I could never do that. That’s for other people, but not me.
Shadow work is simply getting honest about uncomfortable truths about yourself. Fear inventories, which is one exercise in the shadow work category, is when you set aside time to write down some of your greatest fears related to one (or some) of your wishes, goals, or dreams.
The honesty there leads you to your true needs and subconscious thoughts that are keeping you tied to the railroad tracks of stagnancy. As a bonus, you can make contact with the parts of your body that are activated, and use energy work to dissolve this. As a bonus bonus, you can figure out what the belief about yourself is connected to there, attached to the fear, and then begin to change it.
At this moment, my fears are many. They are the truth tellers to what I truly want and need. It’s easier for me, now, to get to my needs by way of my fears, because there is a protective quality to my fears. They are a small, tidy, quiet room, where I know where everything is, I’ve reached for them through closed eyes, so many times. My wants and needs and biggest dreams are rolling windy hills, unfamiliar horizons that never end, cantering horses that might be too fast to catch, and that feel correct when they are just out of reach, in the dream space.
I’m afraid I’ll never get well, and that the brain damage that Covid unleashed on me will keep me a dull writer, a foggy thinker, an exhausted and boring human. That I may never get to do certain things I’ve always wanted to, because of this. I’m afraid I won’t be relevant to other humans, literally just as…a human, or a friend, and also a someone to invite places or check in on or collaborate with or hire, that others will equate my illness, my subdued state with disposability. I’m afraid I’ll never be able to accept this current state of brain fragments and energy fragments as reality, even as I know that acceptance gives way to love and love gives way to true healing and recovery. Even as I sit with all the progress I’ve made so far, all the hours of treatments and endless protocols which have ended up working, all the tiny sometimes imperceptible victories, I am afraid I’ll backslide, or that I’ll get reinfected.
I’m afraid that I won’t be able to impress myself again with creativity, with vision, that I won’t find my next big project, discover my next big passion, that the universe won’t ever tap me on the shoulder and give me my next assignment, electric and pregnant with purpose. This is all while I know with each cell in my body that this is my assignment. This moment, right now, is my assignment. To get well, to love myself as I do so, to learn patience and new rhythms, to lean into delightfulness for the sake of delightfulness, to rewrite process, to lean into new forms of expression and communication—with the greater world, yes, but more importantly, with myself.
This present moment is sculpted by our relationship with it and the quality of our presence. We create ourselves by our intentions and pain and grief and expansion and perspective at any given moment.
At the bottom of the long, dark well that are my fears is a story about unconditional love, about rituals of art, about building even stronger trust muscles, about falling in love with the process and decorating time with romance, life with technicolor vibes. My fears are the stories that cruel people told me, once upon a time, when I had no volition, no ability to discern lies from truth. My fears reflect the deepest shadows of a society that exiles the sick, the exhausted, the unproductive. My fears are maybe not even mine, but they do protect, much as pain does.
The needs that my fears tell me about are those of expansion, of being loved and cared for unconditionally, they are of creative growth and optimism, faith, and hope as a muscle. These are the needs that beg me to romance my life, take creative risks, and appreciate all I have. This time is asking me to be ok with being forgotten, but not forgetting myself and God.
Just 5 years ago, I would have balked at the using the word God so freely. Things change, we change—even when we think things never will, especially when we think things never will. I think about how my last name literally means “Servant of God,” and how my middle name is Faith, and how I can never escape either one of those names, so I had better respect them, and use them as fuel to overcome my fears.
a piece by Glenn Lignon.
What are your fears really about?
Is it time to figure that out?