Yesterday I spent my jet lag haze scanning the aisles in a nearby bookstore. My target? Books on writing. I’m always surprised by the lack of how-tos for writers in a bookstore.
But I digress, in the two shelves that I did find I was surprised by the flurry of book titles dealing with fear. (The Courage to Write: How Writer’s Transcend Fear and The Writer’s Portable Therapist, to name a few.) Is writing a scary profession? We don’t risk our lives daily like stuntmen or hold the lives of men, women and children in our hands like doctors, so what’s with all these books on fear?
Then I started having visions about my Hawaiian vacation back home. Sneezing through dust filled binders stuffed with old papers, I was perplexed by what I saw. Wordy prose, unsightly grammatical errors and lengthly text swallowed my thoughts and points. The attack of the too much word monster strikes again. It’s what haunted my old homework assignments and what still gets to me now. What plagued my work was a lack of confidence that the words could speak for themselves.
Why is writing so scary? Like anything you do which involves having your heart on the line, there is a huge risk of your heart getting broken. When you put yourself out there, there’s a chance that people won’t like what you have to offer (fear of rejection) or that you might not be good enough (insecurity). The best cure for either is to build up your self-confidence.
If you are a writer or a job dreamer, counterattack those fear episodes and transform seemingly indestructible obstacles by becoming the confident, self-assured person you want to be. Author Ariel Gore of, “How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead” uses a superhero alter ego to take over tasks that mere mortals can’t do. Singer Beyonce Knowles uses ‘Sasha’ another alter ego as her stage persona. In the November 2005 issue of Vanity Fair she said, “I always held back in Destiny’s Child, because I was comfortable in a group and felt that I didn’t have to do anything 100 percent, because there were other people onstage with me. I would not lose myself or go all the way.”
This quote similarly represents what I went through as a writer. I often held back because I wasn’t comfortable putting it all out there. I thought that I had to beef up my prose with difficult words and phrases to cover up the fact that I wasn’t a good enough writer. This way if people rejected what they read I could just say, “Well I wasn’t really trying anyway.”
The fear monster took over my words and ended up controlling my life. It took me two degrees and a decade later for me to trust what I always knew-that my lot and love in life was to be a writer.
The real question is, “What is holding you back from living the life of your dreams?” You may think it’s money, talent or time but what might be lurking under these is fear.
