“Fear is just a shadow of // the things that matter the most” – Jon Foreman, Slipping Away

Fear is such a subtle thing. I often don’t realize it’s working on me when it is. I often call it anxiety. I often call it busy. I say I don’t have enough time. I put other things higher on the priority list. I make excuses. I avoid it all together.

It’s amazing to me the lengths I go to avoid doing something I’m afraid to do. And even if I convince myself to get started, I always call it quits before I’m knee deep in the water.

What is the cure of this fear? What will convince me to keep going with it even when I don’t feel the relief after getting started?

I think seeing things in the proper light is the first step. How monumental really is the thing I’m afraid of? If I step back and see that my failures don’t actually say anything about who I am, then I feel the fear begin to relieve. It’s identity. It’s when my inner voice says, “You gotta be good at this or else you’re no one,” that it keeps me paralyzed. Why start at all when failure means you’re a no one?

But can we all recognize how not true this is? Are people defined by one thing they do? Of course not, so how could they be defined by one failure? Failure is the spark to the gasoline in the beginnings of doing something true and genuine. Failure is the language we all speak, whether we speak in our native tongue or not.

A Switchfoot song called Slipping Away says it like this: “Fear is just a shadow of the things that matter the most.” And this is what is so paralyzing to me. What matters most to you is what you most afraid of doing. If being cool is important to you, any crack in the infrastructure of your style or persona is the object of your fear, the monster under your bed. If being successful is important to you, any missed opportunity or wrong perception of you instantly sends you into panic and hopelessness.

I say all this to say. In order to expose and fight our fears, we must first recognize what matters most to us. Or vice versa, in order to find out what matters most to us, we have to look at what we’re afraid of.