As a teenager and young tween, I don’t remember being “afraid.” I was human, I still had insecurities. Yet, I don’t remember ever feeling fear, the way other peers did.

Fear never interfered with my actions.

I believed order mattered. I believed people who broke rules should be ready for the consequences. That made me the kind of kid teachers and classmates trusted to enforce rules, and I got elected more than once because of it.

My mom shaped this too. She is fearless, sometimes to a fault. I do not admire how she argues. However, I cannot deny that she’s forceful and often wills her PoV into existence.

So, I was a rule follower, but I still confronted people.

At the ripe age of 40, I realized I’ve learned two things that leave me confused, amused and with some additional complex clarity.

First, I realized that the system isn’t perfect. The best systems work for the majority of the people. In an ideal world that would be the highest common factor, but endds up being the lowest common denominator. Additionally, these sytems are flawed because they are designed by flawed people with their own imperfect motivations.

Second, rule-breakers are not all the same. Some are selfish, but, some are useful. They expose cracks in the system that I was ignoring. I question if it’s ignorance or denial but I don’t have clarity.

At the same time this was happening, I became increasingly risk-averse. When I look at my past, some were sunk cost fallacies. Often when I dig deeper, the underlying motivation was eventually fear. Fear of losing status. Fear of the unknown. Fear of being exposed.

So, at the same time that I was developing clarity about the system and a respect for rule-breakers, I was increasingly becoming a fearful rule follower.

This combination was an open invite to fear’s degen cousin: shame. I was ashamed of who I was because of the juxtaposition of id. The young fearless me was still in there, buried deep, sneering at the old fearful me.

I tried to bury that shame deeper and deeper by distracting myself - with feeds, with projects, with series and movies and reading and writing and music and anything else that would not make me process the contradiction that I was turning out to be.

I became avoidant - less confrontational, fearful of losing some amorphous thing in my head, risk averse, all the while being ashamed of it. It was an ugly morass.

That added anxiety - a knot that I kept feeding more strinsg of avoidance. Things that i left unprocessed, because i didn’t want to deal with it. They just lie there simmering and gathering friends of more unprocessed weevils.

This twisted mangled ball of strings - of shame, fear, anxiety of not dealing with it kept going. Another feed, another project, another distraction.

I can now say this with levity - what a clusterfuck!

Like how Jim Carrey realizes in Liar Liar

https://youtu.be/TeAlXdHBTsA

And the truth shall set you free!

Processing it was not clean. I pulled a thread, usually just making additional multiple knots. Things became messier, much messier, before they got clearer. Yet, the motion mattered. With each pull, I felt freedom - a better understanding - of my insecurities, of my fears, of shame. Of being able to label some feelings that I never stood still to process.

It took me months, but I kept at it. The mess broke into smaller clumps, then smaller clumps again, until I could finally see the shape of what I was carrying. That relief, when you detangle the mess, is massive and indescribable. It was overwhelming and freeing.

I feel lighter on my feet, lighter in my relationships, lighter on myself. The younger me may not recognize that as progress, the older me appreciates the hard work required.

I have more callus now. I am not done. But I know what to do when the knot starts tightening again. I am not perfect, never was, never will be. There are still bad habits in me that I need to deal with, or accept as part of the rich tapestry that makes me - me. However, I am fearless, I am not ashamed and now I have a playbook to deal when anxiety starts to linger.

Take a moment, touch grass, and process. Not mastery of any of it, just rigorous practice.