Fear

As I was writing the two posts about "the dog", I was fretting over whether or not to bother posting them. They weren't "important".  They contained nothing interesting, they were just stories from my life.  Who would want to read that??

Then a whole litany of reasons not to write came flooding into my mind.  It's boring, people won't like what I have to say, it's not well written, I sound like a whiner, I'm making myself out to be something I'm not, it's a waste of time, I'm going to run out of things to say... and on and on and on.

I was doing something I loved, getting positive feedback from people and yet I was wracked with negative thoughts about it.

What the hell was going on?

Fear.

Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being exposed as a fraud and here's the kicker -  fear of what others think.  It almost stopped me.  I considered quitting but then a couple of things happened.

First of all I realized my fear wasn't real.  Fortunately I recognized this pretty quickly because of my familiarity with this paralytic state and with the help of my husband and good friends I was able to work my way out of it.  It's taken me a long time and a lot of internal work to get to this point.  I used to think that my fears were real.  And I let them stop me.

Another interesting thing happened then - I realized that I'm having way too much fun to stop!  I hope that people read this, and I hope that they get something out of it, but ultimately I have no control over that.  I can only do the work. 

This brings me back to my last post about love.  'Love conquering all' isn't just about loving another person. It's also about loving something enough to risk conquering your fears.  Love was what kept me from quitting this blog.  I'm having a ball writing it.  It's not about money or recognition, it's about joy.  Writing this makes me happy.  If others enjoy it too, that's the icing on the cake.