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[Personal Reflection] I started Brave Enterprises to help people manage the fear they feel. But, if I'm being honest, I really started it to help myself brave the fear I feel.
When I was a little girl, I had to make sure that my stuffed animals could breathe when I left them for the day. Now that I'm in my 40s, I have to make sure that my daughter's stuffed animals can breathe when I leave them for the day.
I'm sensitive, I am.
I'm too sensitive.
I'm too affected.
I'm too aggressive.
I've always felt the opposite of not enough.
I've always felt like I was too much.
People told me so. And, for so much of my life, I believed them.
Maybe age has made me less concerned. Maybe time has gifted me with knowing. Maybe experience has provided enough evidence that I should be confident in my own self, in my own hunches and opinions, my wants and needs.
I spent my coming-of-age years trying to reconcile this panoply of paradoxes:
> Fierce on the field and so fragile off it
> Mentally strong and emotionally weak
> Physically gifted and debilitated by depression
> Fueled by creative expression and hiding inside myself
> Extroverted performer who required introverted recuperation
> Starving for privacy and bloated with attention
> Easy to ignite and resistance to resuscitation
> Emotionally clairvoyant and socially arrested
> Passionate in a straight jacket
> Eager and scared
> Interested and interesting
> Bored and boring
> Ambitious and suicidal
In middle school, I lied a lot because the real truth hurt too much.
In high school, my fear boxed me in, chained me to the wall and beat me so badly that afterward, my face might as well have been someone else's.
In college, I'd sit and stare for hours at the same crack in the wall in my coaches office while exhaustively screaming at myself inside my own head to just look up into her eyes and ask for help. I needed help.
Back then, I didn't know if it would get better, but I did have proof it could get worse.
I don't know about this world or this life any more than you. But I do know that I have my eyes and my hands right now.
I have my deep feelings and the memories of past struggles. I have the callouses from current ones.
I also have a body that refuses not to pack itself with power, a spirit that has magic generators of explosive passion, and a damn will that is as curious as it is absolute.
I am grateful for it all and I am scared of It all.
At the same time.
We sound like we are kindred spirits. What I am learning in my 40’s is that your self speak has to be louder than what people have said. ❤️