1.

You can ask any one of my dance teachers from childhood and they will tell you it is a pure miracle that I make a living as a public speaker.

Really and truly, this career should not be a thing.

The thing to know about me is that I quit competitive dancing when I was sixteen years old because of raging anxiety every time I went to step onto that stage. I had always been a nervous kid, always getting the jitters before a performance, but this was something different. This was a real fear. This was can’t-catch-my-breath, panic-attack fear. And it didn’t just happen once. It happened over and over again until I couldn’t keep track anymore.

The girls on my dance teams were saints. They would talk me off the edge. They would remind me to have fun. I was a part of a team and so I knew I had to perform but when the chance came to quit at the end of the year, I leaped at it.

I told myself: I want to be behind the scenes. I don’t want to perform anymore. I dislike the spotlight. I won’t go back. 

This was my fear talking. Apart from childhood (thinking I might be the next Shirley Temple), I’ve never been one to want to shine the brightest. I simply like doing good work. I believe in ambition. I am a perfectionist at heart, recovering daily. But here is what I had to stop allowing: I had to stop allowing fear the courtesy of writing me a story that wasn’t true.

 

2.

My first time back on a stage was a Christmas program. I heard someone do a spoken word poem and I thought, “I have that in me.” I proposed the idea to my pastor, thinking he would assign someone the role. But he asked me to do it. More specifically, he told me I would do it and didn’t give me a chance to back down.

I took to the stage with my little poem and it was like waves of peace crashing over and over me. I still had every bit of nerves leading up to it. I still wanted to cry (and likely did), but we all have one small step to take towards a better story.

 

3.

Fear isn’t one thing. Fear is a bunch of little things all stacked up to look seemingly powerful. And, as much as I hate to give fear the credit, it is powerful. It stops you from moving forward. It makes you act smaller. It keeps you from being here now. Fear is the thing that says, “Don’t go tonight. You don’t belong there.” Fear is the whisper that says, “You? People don’t like you.”

Fear is a voice I easily become immune to, not even realizing it is there and talking to me. It says right in the bible that God didn’t give me a spirit of fear and yet I take it with me on most mornings, the way you take your jacket for that October air.

I don’t lie or tell half-truths in this space. To do that would be to tell you that I never listen to the fear. That I never let the fear give me a name that isn’t my own. Fear has given me medicine and fear has given me heartache. Fear has convinced me I am someone else too many times to count.

 

4.

It’s doing the thing that makes you want to throw up. As ineloquent as that advice is, that’s where you need to start most days. Whether that’s saying “yes” when you would rather say no. Whether that’s going on the Tinder date. Maybe it’s clicking “publish” or maybe it’s finally sending that text. If you want to vomit when you think about the action, then there’s usually a mission there.

I wish you and I could dismantle fear in some other way. I wish it was a matter of reading a book about fear and watching all our awful fears trickle away. Fear dissolves through action though.

You get two pairs of eyeglasses in this lifetime. Call them hipster eyeglasses with no real prescription to back them up, but you can put one of two different lenses on. You’ve got the lens of love and the lens of fear. The two will make you look entirely different.

Love is attractive. It draws people to you. People will want to know what you’re drinking and how they can do the same. Love is a party host. It invites everyone in. It says, “There is more room. Everyone scoot down, we’ve got the room for one more.”

Fear is a shell. It dries up the atmosphere. It keeps us all on eggshells. I don’t want to say people won’t want to be around you if you lead out of fear. That’s not a claim I can make after living that way for a long time. But I can tell you this: people notice when you live out of fear as opposed to love. It’s easy to catch. The ones who operate out of love want something so different for their fear-driven friends.

 

5.

I remember my friend Dimitri gaining the courage to tell me, a year into our friendship, that when he met me he could see right through me.

He thought to himself, this girl looks cool but I feel like she is hiding behind so much. I wonder what kind of walls she has up around her.

He thought to himself, this girl looks cool but I feel like she is hiding behind so much. I wonder what kind of walls she has up around her.

I was walking into every encounter wearing fear glasses, hoping people would mistake me for love instead. But these are the people you want in your life: people who see through your act and call you up to something better. People who say, “I know who you are under that thick, thick layer of fear. I see you. I know you’re coming back to yourself.”

 

6.

Maybe I’m your chance encounter for the day. If I am the only one that tells you this today then let it be so, “Fear doesn’t fit you.

Of all the good things God gave you, you have to stop double-fisting the thing he never asked you to hold. Fear. It’ll take things from you. It’ll write stories for you which aren’t true.

Love is a bigger story.

I know who you are under that thick, thick layer of fear. I see you. I know you’re coming back to yourself.”