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

Fear never interfered with my actions.

I believed order mattered. That made me the kind of kid teachers and classmates trusted to enforce rules, and I got elected more than once because of it.

I believed people who broke rules should be ready for the consequences. In India, that belief got practice everywhere: the commute, queues, street stalls.

My mom shaped this too. She is fearless, sometimes to a fault. I do not admire how she argues, but I can’t deny the force of it.

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

However, as I’ve learned two things that leave me confused, amused and now with some additional complex clarity.

First, I realized that the system isn’t perfect. The best systems work for the majority of the people, but even those 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. Some are useful. Some expose cracks in the system I was too comfortable ignoring.

At the same time this was happening, I became more risk-averse. During times of clarity, when I look at my past, some of were sunk cost fallacies. But even that was driven by 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. 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 string. 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.

It was like a twisted mangled ball of strings - of shame, fear, anxiety of not dealing with it all the while adding entirely new strings to the mangled ball by distracting projects.

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 hitting 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.

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 might 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.