On feeling fear and doing hard things
I have come to realize that I have experienced most periods of my life as transitionary: constantly looking optimistically ahead to the future. Although optimism can be great, functioning in this way optimism made me ignore the work of the present by making that work to simply plan for the work ahead. This tactic has caused a lot of my thoughts to be preoccupied with my next action steps instead of current ones, therefore successfully avoiding any real action steps and the scariness of doing real work and taking any risks. A simple way for me to define what I would do is busywork.
When I was in high school, this looked like planning all the things I would finally be able to do in university living “independently”. As a university student, I was always planning for the summers, when I could leave the small university town, move back in with my parents for the season to work in Toronto. After graduation, it was a couple years of planning for the “perfect time” to leave said small university town (that I found myself lingering in). After a breakup, it was working in Toronto once again, planning a move to Shanghai. In Shanghai, it was fantasizing about what I would go back to school for when I moved back to Toronto.
I was effectively stuck in this cycle when the pandemic hit Canada in March. My plan right before that point was to begin to serve in restaurants again, save up money, and go back to school. Plan foiled.
Upon the hours and days and weeks and months of self-reflection that can only happen in lockdown, I became aware of this “transitionary” mindset and busywork that has too-long been my crutch. With no pandemic end in sight, I was no longer able to rely upon my safe “when _______ is over I am going to do x, y, and z” and instead found myself thinking “before the pandemic ends I want to do x, y, and z”.
Now, from that change in thinking, instead of putting things off due to fear of difficulty and negative feelings, I’ve been tackling challenges and realizing that failure isn’t so bad because I get to learn something along the way. The “reward” becomes the tasks and actions themselves, instead of all the end goals I had been holding up on a pedestal. Enjoying the tasks (or the journey as they say), is easier when I remember that perfection is a myth and nothing really has a completion date!
Recently, I’ve started learning how to code, something I’ve always been terrified of because of how hard I perceived it to be. Although coding is really difficult, I find myself enjoying the challenge and embracing being a beginner. Now, when I feel myself becoming scared and anxious about all the things in code I don’t yet know or understand, I acknowledge the bad feelings instead of being scared of them. By feeling them in the present instead of pushing them to the future, I am able to quickly move past them and embrace the feeling of curiosity that inevitably follows. Through coding, I have been planning my future by actively building for it, rather than escaping towards it. I can view living as a continuous state, instead of a fragmented one that only has transition periods and “end goals”. I’m terrified of writing, but I was able to write this in a practice of completing tasks and accepting the process: mistakes and all. Fear is still a part of my life, but the ability to overcome fear is as well.
