I think that to some extent, everyone is motivated by fear. Our fears can give us a reason to not do something just as much as a reason to do something. Fear can push us to be brave, to challenge ourselves, to seek out adventure because it’s…scary. Oftentimes, you can address that scariness by simply diving into the situation, becoming familiar with it, adapting, and growing. Whatever that thing was, it no longer scares you by the time you’re finished with the experience.
These past few years have been an exercise in facing down my longstanding fears. I took risks and adapted and grew, but some of those risks didn’t pay off. Some of these risks went south, and I ended up confronting a whole new set of fears. Layer upon layer, they’ve stacked up and now I’m fumbling around for the mental and emotional strength I’ve been working on building up.
I know there’s freedom to be found by facing down our fears, one by one. So, here are mine:
Fear 1: Hurting my child
In late 2020, I started dating again after many years of being single. At first, it was thrilling. I had several brief relationships – just long enough to remind me that I have abandonment issues and always take breakups way too hard. I then promptly fell deeply in love with a man who is eight years younger than me. We seemed to be in similar stages of our lives: we were both post-divorce after a decade-long marriage and our children are the same age.
This relationship brought me to life after nearly a decade of no emotional intimacy with anyone other than my own child. I felt like I’d been given a chance at a fresh start at life right in the middle of mine (I’d just turned 41 when we met), and I couldn’t believe my luck. I was grateful, to say the least.
It was this relationship that pushed me to move out of the house I was sharing with my ex-husband as we coparented our child together. He lived on one floor of the house and I lived on another. It worked, to an extent. It also took the pressure off me to secure a salaried position instead of freelancing and for a minute, it seemed as though I could finally relax – all of my bills paid with plenty left over – the first time in years. However, my new boyfriend was hardly a fan of the arrangement.
I eventually got a salaried position and thus new financial means, so I moved out to pursue my new relationship. That’s what you do, right? But the thing that had really kept me in that living arrangement with my coparent for so long was a deep-seated fear of hurting my child. He had moved from place to place with me and I wanted to ensure that, as an only child, he felt as though he belonged to an unshakable, unbreakable family unit. I was deeply afraid of the pain I would cause him by moving out.
I faced that fear and moved out. It was an emotionally taxing decision, one that came with heavy feelings and worries – but it also seemed necessary at the time. If my living situation was the only thing preventing me from having the best relationship of my life, I should change it, right? Me moving out did, in fact, hurt my son. It caused him much pain and in the process of dealing with it, I realized that I can’t actually prevent or even fully protect my child from getting hurt by life. Pain will always find us, whether we’re young or old. I can’t save him from the blows that emerge out of nowhere, knocking us down and making us wonder what hit us. I am not always in control of what happens.
But what I can do is help him get up when life knocks him down. What I can do is support him through the emotional processing of big schisms in his life and show him there’s a path forward to happiness. That is what I’m telling myself now as my first long-term, post-divorce relationship falls apart. I lost my salaried position two months after I moved into my new place. With no partner to share the rent and no space for a roommate, I now have to move once more. This time, it won’t be into the home my son shares with his father or anywhere nearby. I’m moving quite a bit further away, which will impact how often I see him. This was the risk I took when I moved out and left the financial security I had – I risked things not working out, and they didn’t.
Loss of time with my son, too, is my great fear. And this, too, I am facing head on. I will make it through whatever instability lies ahead.
Fear 2: Losing out on a great love in life
Ever arrived in midlife with a lengthy marriage behind you and wondered will I ever experience real love? I’m halfway through life and I haven’t. Will I even get the chance? I’m sure a lot of people in less-than-satisfying marriages can relate.
For me, someone came along who seemed like my chance. What a connection! We connected on so many levels and had a truly beautiful, caring, and loving bond between us. I feared missing out on love and that fear caused me to overlook a few things. After all, not all substance abuse looks the same. Some people can go months sober before relapsing, quickly and suddenly…only to get right back up and be sober again. If you haven’t seen this pattern before, it’s tricky to figure out what’s going on. If you can abstain from a substance for relatively lengthy periods of time, can you still be an addict? (Spoiler: Yes, you can). It turns out that my anxiety cannot really handle sharing a life with someone who is struggling with stability in theirs.
So I am confronting this fear now: perhaps I am losing the great love of my life. Still, I might eventually find something different that could, in its own way, bring a satisfying and rewarding kind of love. And perhaps I am not too old, too invisible yet to find something beautiful once more in life.
Fear 3: Becoming like my parents
Surely this is one of the most widely held fears as there are so many of us who don’t want to be our parents. I’ve had to learn how to not simply react as though responding to my parents’ behaviour and make my own decisions autonomously instead. To illustrate, say I’d grown up poor and it was a miserable experience – so I spent the rest of my life pursuing money as a way to insulate me from that experience, to ensure I never endure poverty again. This is a reactive response: it says “my parents did X, which I hated, so I’ll do Y.”
But autonomous decision-making doesn’t refer to parental behaviour at all. What my parents did shouldn’t be the basis for my decision-making. Instead, autonomy roots all decisions in a place of self-confidence that says, “Here is what’s best for me. Maybe I also want to do X, but I’ll do it for my own reasons. Or maybe I still want to do Y, but I won’t do it for any reason related to your behaviour.”
So I remind myself that just because my parents had a long, bitter, drawn-out divorce that lasted for about a decade and permanently shattered the structure of my family of origin doesn’t mean that my break-up will harm my child as much or as deeply. My child has access to therapy and other resources. Neither of my big break-ups were remotely as messy. I will not be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in court. I will not have endless conflicts. I will not turn to substances myself. I will limit the damage as best as I can, and help my child through the rest.
I think we are all defined by our fears, in one way or another. If we’ve never confronted them, then our life is defined strictly by the things we were unafraid to do. If we have confronted them, then our life is shaped by the things of which we were once afraid but embraced nonetheless. One way or another, our fears tell us who we are. Here I am, reminding myself that I am a person who embraces fear. I am a person who gains confidence from doing so. I am the person who emerges out the other side, ready to take risks once more.
But before I do, I need to mourn the losses that accompanied my fears coming true. I need to pack up a home I thought was going to be long-term, sell the objects and furniture and plants that I selected and cared for. I need to hold my son’s hand and apologize for some more changes that I never wanted, but find myself navigating nonetheless. I need to grapple with the feelings of rejection and frustration that come from having shared so much of your life with someone only to have them exit, quickly and decisively, in a way that leaves your life shattered. I need to train my mind to take the good of the relationship with me and leave the bad behind. I need to process my grief at losing my home, my safe place, and still more time with my child.
Step by step, I will confront each of these losses and move past these fears. In the future, I’ll be more brave and less prone to indulge my fear in general because I’ll already know how things turn out when all my fears came true – how they actually turned out and how I navigated them successfully. And the next time I find myself in this position, I’ll know that there’s truly nothing I can’t handle.1
Except perhaps capture and torture by some terrorist group. I don’t know why this vision has plagued me for decades but I suspect it has something to do with my military training, which involved an exercise called SERE school that brought to life this very scenario. I ended up leaving my training shortly before SERE school started and I think I always wondered what I missed out on. I have felt enough physical pain in life to grasp that I would probably not be able to handle this situation very well.