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Tag: fear

Let It Go (and I don’t mean Frozen)

We’re nearly two months into the school year, and I’m sure for many of you, things are piling up. Homework, projects, extracurricular activities, work . . . not to mention that relationships take time, and so do hobbies (for myself, that’s writing and blogging). We complain that life is busy, and it is. When is it anything but? I know, I know, some seasons of life are busier than others, or they’re a different kind of busy, but the fact remains: there is always something going on.
Some of those things we have control over. Many things we do not. Things like school and work are musts. Relationships are the biggest things in life, and so we don’t want to sacrifice time spent building them. And if we neglect recreation for too long, we burn out. So what in the world do you do when life gets crazy and there’s just nothing you can cut out?*
*I would first examine if that’s really true, because chances are, there is something you can minimize or eliminate or postpone. Really.
Most of the time . . .

We. Get. Stressed.

And we blame the circumstances for our stress. But actually, those things that keep us busy, those deadlines and requirements and must-do activities, are just stressors. How you react to them is completely up to you.
Stress is actually low-level fear. It’s not a red-hot explosion of panic, but a constant drone in the back of your mind. It’s the constant nagging, the to-do list digging its claws in, the underlying buzz of thoughts saying, “Can I do this? Will I make it? I don’t know if I can. There’s this, this, this, and this to do today, and all of THIS to do tomorrow. I don’t have enough to give. I’m going to disappoint people. I’m going to disappoint myself. I’m failing. I’m buried. I’m overwhelmed. I’M STRESSED.”


Something I’m learning is that I need to let go of the things I have no control over. Sure, there’s a lot I can change–I can adjust my schedule, I can work on my beliefs about a situation so that I don’t stress out as easily–but there’s always lots in life that I just have no control over. So there’s no point in freaking out about those things.

So what if there’s an accident on the way to school and it’s slowing down traffic, making me late for class? That’s an extenuating circumstance. If I gave myself sufficient time to get to school, and something like that makes me late, that’s not my fault. So in the middle of the backed-up traffic, I don’t need to panic.

So what if a customer issue comes up at work and I don’t have time to finish the cleaning project my manager gave me? A more important issue came up, so the project will have to wait for another time. And that’s okay. I don’t need to feel guilty about it.

So what if you have to go to school or work or any other number of obligations? Yes, it limits your free time, but you’ll just have to accept it and work around it. Don’t put needless pressure on yourself to accomplish more than you have time for.

When you brush all of that aside, your mind is suddenly a lot freer to start focusing on what you can do, and what you do have control over. It’s a lot less stressful. A lot more freeing.

So relax, friend. Life may be full of stressors right now, but it doesn’t mean you need to be stressed. Shift your focus, release what you can’t control, and just figure out what the next step is. That’s all.

You’ve got this.

Escaping the Shame Storm

In the last post, I promised I’d share the high ropes story. So while the memory is still fresh, here we go . . .

Last month, my college classmates and I (sixteen of us in total, plus our two teachers) went to camp for two days to solidify our team and get hands-on experience in working towards goals and taking leadership. This took the form of a blind follow-the-leader activity, trust falls (eeek!), and getting the entire team through a “spiderweb” of rope without touching the web.

That was just the first morning.

During the first afternoon, we took turns climbing the climbing wall and going ziplining, which I mentioned in my last Subplots and Storylines post. Climbing up the fifty-foot ziplining pole was a little freaky, but sitting up on the platform while the facilitator clipped my harness to the zipline was worse. I was sitting on the edge, legs dangling over empty space, and the tops of the trees looked too close.

one of my classmates, the first to go up

I took a deep breath and tried to push off, but froze. I tried again–same thing. “Can you push me off?” I asked the facilitator.

“Do you want me to?” His voice sounded mildly amused. “I think you can do it.”

I guess being reminded that I was capable was what I needed, because I took another deep breath, squeezed my eyes shut, and launched off, an unbidden scream bursting out of me. Half a second later, my eyes were open and I was zooming down the line, having the time of my life. The end came too soon.

After ziplining, I conquered the climbing wall. Like I mentioned in the S&S post, I managed to get halfway up the difficult side–after slipping off and dangling by my harness a couple of times–but by then my arms were sore and I was ready to come down.

But I didn’t want to give up, so I then successfully climbed the easier side, though I did slip once more on the way up. Thank goodness for the person belaying me.

So you can imagine I was feeling pumped and proud of myself and ready to take on the world!

That night, my room’s heater was blasting way too high, leading to a less-than-restful sleep. The morning before camp, I had woken up early, so all in all, I entered day two of camp with low energy levels.

After breakfast, we all headed to the high ropes course. There were different challenges, such as the Giant’s Ladder, a series of wooden beams with each one spaced further apart than the one before. I helped belay for a team of four taking on that particular challenge. There is no way I’m going up there, I thought to myself, content to hold the rope, keep an eye on my climber, and ensure her safety.

An hour later, after the team had reached the top and come back down, everyone who hadn’t had a chance to participate in a challenge course yet was rounded up, including myself. A facilitator told me to join the Giant’s Ladder team, but I said no, if I had to do any of them, I’d rather do Team All Aboard: a pole with a small, square platform on top, where three or four people had to stand, link arms, and lean backwards all together.

So I harness up and started climbing the pole. Some of my teammates, having seen my reluctance, shouted encouragement from below. My belayer instructed me to climb around the pole once I got partway up, in order to keep my line from tangling with those of the two girls already up there.

So I climbed up the ladder. Onto the first few staple footholds of the pole. I looked up at the platform above my head. I adjusted my grip. I closed my eyes. Suddenly the thought of reaching the top was overwhelming. I could barely think of taking the next step. It’s just like climbing up to the zipline, Tracey. This shouldn’t be hard.


I’ve climbed a high ropes course before, about three years ago. It was terrifying and a lot harder than what I was currently embarking on, but I’d made it. Logically, this one shouldn’t be a problem.

“Is it okay if just two people go up instead of three?” I called. “Can I come down?”

The facilitator looked up at me. “Why do you want to come down, Tracey?” he asked.

I fought back irrational tears. “I’m just tired. No motivation.”

“It’s okay. You did well.”

And so I climbed back down. Taking my helmet off with trembling hands, I avoided gazes and nodded when classmates told me I had done a good job, I had stepped out of my comfort zone, way to go.

As I walked away, one of my teachers approached. “Hey, no one’s disappointed in you.”

“Yeah, except for me,” I said, and started crying.

My other teacher joined us. “Tracey, what is excellence?”

I wiped tears away and tried to tamp down another wave. “Doing the best you can with what you have, I know.”

Later on–after a hug and some encouraging words–everyone gathered for a debrief to share what we’d learned and accomplished. As classmates talked about conquering fears and depending on each other, another wave of guilt washed over me. You could’ve pushed past it. You could’ve taken one more step, and then one more, and one more, and made it to the top. Why didn’t you?

When it came to my turn, and I forced out a few brief words that did a poor job of veiling my guilt, the female facilitator debriefing with us had something powerful to say.

When things don’t go as planned or we fail to accomplish the goal we’ve set out for ourselves, it’s easy to give into a “shame storm,” to beat ourselves up about it. But we can’t do that. It’s damaging. It’s not true.

I tried to quell the storm raging inside of me, but my teacher (the first one) saw the look on my face as we headed back to the main lodge.

“You heard what she said?” he asked me. “Don’t give in. Don’t give in to the shame.”

The whole experience stuck with me long after we left camp. I do tend to be hard on myself, to replay my failures, to beat myself up for making a mistake . . . or even just for doing less than I expected of myself.

[source]

But it’s time to stop thinking that way. Those thoughts are whip lashes, they’re chains. Destructive, imprisoning. It’s time to stop giving in to the shame, time to realize I did the best I can, and that’s all I can do, and that’s okay. I can learn from those experiences, yes, but then I need to leave it there and walk away. I don’t have to carry it with me.

I’m sharing this story because I’m pretty certain you have your own storm of shame, thundering in your ears and lashing you from the inside. Others may not see that you’re bleeding, but you know it. You suffer that barrage of thoughts saying, “Why didn’t you make it? What’s wrong with you? You could have, should have–didn’t. You failed, therefore you are a failure.

You know what I say to that? Yes, I failed, but that means I’m a tryer.

I’m still trying to believe that I did not actually fail at the high ropes course, that I really did do the best I could with what I had. What I had was not much, but I strapped my harness on. I climbed the ladder. I started up the pole. So I didn’t reach the top and complete the challenge. I still challenged myself. It’s not about completion.

Listen to me, friend. Whether it was a true failure or you simply did the best you could with what you had, and it wasn’t enough–it does not define you. Accept that, learn from it, and move on. It’s the moving on part that’s really hard, but please try.

As I slowly worked through the tangle of thoughts and feelings after the ropes course, and I began to let go of the guilt, I was surprised to feel lighter. Surprised that I was still having fun and enjoying my day, when hours ago I’d been crying. And I started to feel guilty for not feeling more guilty. But I shut that voice up. Not perfectly–some whispers got through–but I will always look back on that day as my battle against the shame storm.

I hope that one day I can say truthfully that the storm comes less often. That when it does, I can let it go and see the waves calm. I want to walk on those waters a conqueror, with my identity anchored not in my successes or failures, but in the One who loves me through them both.

To the Perfectionists

Dear Perfectionist,

I have something to tell you, and by extension, something to tell myself. You have many faces and many forms, and so I write this to:

  • the neat-freak who cannot stand a molecule of dust out of place
  • the perfectionist in disguise whose desk is in chaos but whose personal standards are sky high
  • the one who puts in countless hours in an effort to achieve the perfect ____ (fill in the blank: musical skill, writing abilities, sports performance, test scores, etc.)
  • the one who expects everyone else to hold the same high standards
  • the one who extends grace to everyone but themselves
  • and the one who’s given up because they’ve failed too many times

You are a slave. You are chained to an ideal, a cruel master impossible to please. Day after day you strive to reach perfection. Or maybe you don’t even call it that. Maybe in your mind, Perfect is known as Better. Whatever its name, you chase it relentlessly, but somehow it always eludes you.

You likely don’t chase it in every area of life. Maybe you seek it in performance, but you’re perfectly all right with a messy room. Maybe you seek it in your outer world–everything in its place–but less so in your inner world, where you give yourself room for mistakes. And quite likely it’s an even more intricate paradox than that–your bookshelf might be organized alphabetically but your closet looks like a tornado hit it. You may hold strictly to an academic standard, yet not so much in physical fitness. There are infinite combinations, but if this letter is to you, there is at least one area in which you are enslaved.

Can I tell you something? I’m a perfectionist in disguise. My room is sometimes a group of little contained messes, with semi-organized piles of papers and books and things that belong together in some abstract way that only makes sense to me.

I think it should be cleaner.

When I sit down to write, I’m mostly okay with clumsy sentences, scrambled plots, and misbehaving characters in a first draft.

But I think I should write more, or faster.

Do I chase a state of perfection? Maybe. I don’t know. But I do know I chase progress. Because progress means movement towards perfection, or if not that, betterment. If I wake up intending to get some good writing done, and I go to bed at night having written nothing because life got in the way, I don’t like it. If I look at an area of my life and see no growth, it bothers me. Am I growing spiritually? Am I progressing as a writer? Am I getting better at my job? Are my relationships doing well? If the answer is ever no, that must mean “try harder.”

Those are the chains I struggle to break. Yours may look different.

This slavery is sneaky. It’s not constant misery. Sometimes you do achieve something you’re happy with (at least somewhat), and so there’s a measure of success, of satisfaction. It’s a carrot dangling in front of your nose, a taste of the glory you’ll feel when you finally reach that perfection in full. But when you stumble, your own whip comes whistling down to tear your back.

You could have done better.
You should have done more.
You shouldn’t have said that.
You failed.

Bleeding, you drag yourself up and try again. The worst part about this enslavement is that most of the time, you’re not aware. You don’t realize you hold the whip; you don’t know you’re bleeding out. You have moments of self-awareness, but those usually end up in more lashes, because goodness knows you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. (And down comes the whip again.)

What drives you? Why do you so badly desire that perfection? Do you know?

Like so many other things, the answer is rooted in fear.

Fear of failure, of rejection, of not being loved. Because if you’re good enough, they’ll love you, right? If you press on and work harder, do better, they’ll accept you. You’ll have a place in the ranks. You’ll mean something. You’ll be worthy.

If you do better, God will love you.

Is that the lie you’ve believed? Because trust me, though your mind may balk and say, “I know that’s not true, I know God loves me no matter what,” your heart might tell a different story. Mine has. And trust me when I say that your heart can hold so tightly to that belief, that it thickens and tightens and wraps a chain around your neck. And for the longest time, I had no idea that iron grip was there.

Breaking those bonds takes a journey. It’s a process of discarding the old and knowing the truth that sets you free. I wish the English language had another word for know. The kind I mean isn’t with your head–it’s with your heart. You may mentally acknowledge that you are loved, but do you know it? Do you completely and utterly believe it, to the point that you act like it? Is that truth so rooted in you that any word to the contrary can’t penetrate your heart because you know how very wrong it is?

If you’ve never heard it before, or if you’ve heard it a thousand times with deaf ears, listen now.

You. Are. Loved.

Did you know that if you stopped trying, if you let it all go to pot and let your life fall into shambles, that fact would not change one iota? I know you can hardly wrap your brain around that idea, so try instead to wrap your heart around it. Shut your brain up for just a moment. If you never did another thing for God or for anyone else, He would still love you just as much as He does right now. Your value to Him would remain unchanged. Can you see that? Can you start to?

Once you’re grounded in love, perfection isn’t necessary. Instead, you can strive for something much better: excellence. Do the best you can with what you have, and leave it at that. Keep going, keep improving–to stop is to stagnate–but don’t ever attach the pursuit to your identity. Give yourself grace. God does.

With love from:
A Recovering Perfectionist A Person of Excellence

To Live a Creative Life

 
I sat down to begin chapter one of book
two last week. The blank screen looked back at me . . . well, rather blankly. I
had a three-page outline sitting right next to the computer, with all the
important plot points so neatly delineated. I had envisioned the beginning
multiple times in my head. Characters and voices and emotions and undertones
and plots sang in my ears.

But my fingers, poised above the keys,
were frozen.

What was I missing? This wasn’t writer’s
block. I knew what should happen, or at least had a rough idea of it. The
screen was blank, but my mind wasn’t. Hesitantly, I typed out a few sentences.

Beginnings are hard. You have no momentum
yet, nothing tangible to spring off of. Even if an outline is in place, the
question of where and how and when to start a story is a challenging one.

The sentences morphed into a few
paragraphs. It felt odd, because I was juggling more characters in an opening
scene than I was used to, and they all had specific emotional and mental states
to bring across.

Is this too much of an info dump? I wondered. Should I have started
with this character by herself, alone with her thoughts? Is lumping an entire
family together at the start a bad idea? Does this sound right? Is this
character being proactive enough? It seems like everything is just happening to
her so far; she’s not taking action.

I deleted half of what I’d written.

A few days later, when I had time to sit
down in my writer’s chair again, I picked up where I had cut the scene off. I
tweaked things a bit and typed on. It felt a little less odd, but the questions
and doubts still poked at my thoughts as the words spilled onto two pages . . .
three pages . . . four.

Am I doing this right? Is what I have in
my mind translating properly onto the page?

I fumbled around, feeling the scene out
like a blind woman introducing herself to a new room, unsure if I was
perceiving things correctly.

Book one has spent a long time in
the editing stage. It was a baby born prematurely, and so required plenty of
care and nourishment to bring it to full health. It’s almost ready now, and I
don’t regret a single hour spent poring over those tattered pages. I grew so
much
as a writer through that
process.

That being
said, I’ve been in editor’s mode for quite some time. I drafted a novella or
two in between edits (and those novellas were revised too!), but overall, my
biggest writing focus of the last couple of years has been on editing. So to
sit down and try to draft something new feels a bit strange.

But it’s a bit
like riding a bike—you never really forget how.

It usually
takes some time for me to slip back into the groove when I’ve taken a long
break from writing, or when I switch gears. I’ve learned to be lenient with
myself when that happens. This time, however, I had to do more than just let
myself progress slowly—I had to turn off my inner editor.

With everything
I put on the page, I struggled with the impulse to change it, to rework it. To
make it better. This is something many writers struggle with, this voice of
perfectionism in their heads. That voice is crippling, because it prevents
progress, inhibits creativity, and stifles the story. First drafts are messy.
Unless you’re the sort who makes a fifty-page outline, your first draft will be
rough.

And that’s
okay.

Accept that.
Embrace it. Don’t be afraid to write messy—the beauty of the first draft is
that it’s not final. The point is to get it onto the page, however ugly or
sloppy the words are, so that you have something to work with later.

I saw a sign
in a greenhouse a few days ago, and if it hadn’t been $23, I would’ve taken it
home with me. It read:
 

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

 
That resonated
with me, because that was exactly the problem with my most recent writing
efforts—I was scared of doing it wrong. Scared to skew the image I had in my
head of the perfect story. Scared to see the words fall flat. Scared of not
living up to the book before, of creating something that wasn’t better than its
predecessor.

I’m telling my
inner editor, in no uncertain terms, to shut up for now. “Go to your room. I
don’t want to hear a peep out of you until you’ve thought about what you’ve
done.” (More accurately, until I’m finished playing in the mud and I need some
help fashioning the slop into pies!)

So who’s with
me? Have you been listening to that voice that insists on immediate perfection?
Are you ready to kick it in the teeth and write freely? Let’s do this together.
Let’s lose our fear of being wrong, and live creatively. Polishing can come
later.