What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

Welcome to Format Free Fridays at AskDrDarcy.com, the one day a week when I break the format of answering your questions and I dispense that which we rarely welcome in life: Unsolicited advice.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?  Would you go back to school?  Call your estranged sister?  Risk rejection?  Try again?  Quit your job?  I’d probably have a child.

Fear is a life inhibitor.  Some of us have less fear when we’re young.  Some of us grow out of fear with age.  Others remain paralyzed by it.  Most of us spin stories about why we can’t follow our hearts, why we can’t live our dreams, why we’re stuck.  The smarter you are, the better your story.  But underneath all the layers of rationalization, we’re afraid.

I spend a good part of my day speaking about fears.  Everyone has their own, and what scares one person might not phase someone else.  Many of my clients are afraid of professional rejection.  I’m rejected so often professionally that it’s just become an unremarkable part of my life.  It’s personal rejection that frightens me.  Reaching out to a family member whom I haven’t spoken to in years ~ and even that’s become easier lately.  I think for me, my greatest fear is commitment.  I can commit to a job, a project, a mortgage, even a spouse.  All of those things are reversible.  But committing to a child… I’m terrified of it.  I spent the first 13 years of my career witnessing what happens when parents aren’t fully prepared to have children.  And I spent those years patching their families up the best that I could.

It’s not that I’m afraid I’ll screw a kid up…I’m fairly certain that I would, and hopefully in a much different way than my parents did me.  It’s the chaos that I imagine a child 0-5 brings.  I’m a control freak.  A Virgo. I’m Monica from Friends.  My home is my sanctuary.  It’s peaceful.  Quiet.  That would all change, at least temporarily, if I have a child. So I continue to question, and postpone.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?