Tears for Fears

I’m pretty sure I’ve told my wife “I’m not afraid of nothin” plenty of times. But I also have to admit it isn’t true. There are plenty of times when I’ve been afraid because being scared is natural and normal. But is being scared ever a good thing?

When I was young I was fairly small for my age. In fact, in Junior High I was one of the smallest kids and one day during PE class we were just finishing calisthenics when one of the older, tougher kids in the class punched me in the stomach, dropping me like a rock. I will never forget the kid’s name, Curtis McGuffy. He was always getting in fights at school so I made it a point to do my best to stay away from him. However, I guess he found me that day decided to introduce himself in his own unique way.

It took me several minutes to catch my breath, wipe away the tears, and pick myself up off the ground. Surprisingly our teacher never noticed what happened and when he broke us up into groups, unfortunately I ended up in Curtis’s group. There were 5 boys standing there as I approached and immediately Curtis challenged me to a fight… right in front of them. I was scared silly, my legs were shaking, and I was positive if I accepted his challenge he would beat me to a pulp. So I backed down and walked away. When I got home that night I couldn’t stop thinking about how bad it felt to be humiliated in front of my friends. For weeks I felt ashamed and hated going to school. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore so I sought out my Dad for advice. He told me being afraid is normal and walking away from a fight you can’t win is smart. That didn’t seem to help very much. But then he asked me to think about this question. “What if instead of someone threatening you, they were threatening one of your friends?” I answered back immediately, “Well I’m pretty sure I would jump right in there and help him.” My Dad just smiled and said, “I think you’re gonna be just fine!”

I thought about what my Dad said and understood what he meant about protecting others. His advice was always the best. So from that day on I made two decisions that would help me enormously the rest of my life. I decided no matter what I will always protect my friends and also that I would never ever again allow fear to cause me to walk away from a challenge. Sure enough, two weeks later a friend of mine was getting pushed around by a bigger kid and I jumped right in the middle. I got pummeled and beat up pretty good for about 5 minutes until the coach broke it up, but I got up off the ground with a big smile on my face and a round of high fives from my buddies. I didn’t win the fight but I did succeed in protecting my friend…and I noticed there was nothing humiliating at all about that!

Obviously getting into fights at any age is a bad thing, so I would never encourage anyone to hurt another human being. But fear does have a purpose and a message that we can learn from it. Being afraid is a normal and probably a good thing, allowing it to control our lives is not!

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. 

Fear, to a great extent, is born from the story we tell ourselves, 

so I chose to tell myself a different story…

~ Cheryl Strayed (from the movie "Wild")