Craft of Writing: Know your limits (part 2/3)

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Our bodies have an excellent mechanism for warning us of danger. The limbic system is responsible for this and when it alerts us to potential danger we feel all the sensations of panic, terror, and anxiety. (The 'lizard brain' is responsible for the four 'F's of life: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fucking. I will never forget psych 101 and the professor dropping the F-bomb so casually. Everyone was stunned. I burst out laughing. It kinda set a tone for the rest of that semester. It was a fun class.)

Fear is popularly known as:

False
Evidence
Appearing
Real.

That's just plain nonsense talk. As someone with an anxiety disorder and a laundry list of other related issues, I can tell you that fear is fear. Now, your logical brain may try to cram the emotion through its filter and come up with false evidence for why you're experiencing fear. But, fear is an irrational emotion and one of our warning signs from the limbic system that something is wrong. Way back in the ancient, olden-days of yore, when we were theoretically dodging brontosauruses and sabertoothed bearcats, fear was vital to keeping us safe. It told us from past experience that something was a danger. It told us that an approaching experience was a danger. And it made us very aware of when a present moment turned dangerous. Fear focuses your attention on the target of it so that you can handle it.

So if ancient, olden-days of yore Deb was having an encounter with a sabertoothed bearcat, the fear that I'd have experienced would have made sense to the logical brain because the sabertoothed bearcat ate everything it could. Ah, but what about fear that happens today? We're not dodging brontosauruses, though I'd argue that dodging traffic when crossing the street is close enough. Humans are social animals and the sense of fear that comes up about the prospect of going against social mores (which ever ones hit you the hardest, take your pick there are literally millions of them) and how you were raised is just as hard hitting as the fear of the wild sabertoothed bearcat. Where the sabertoothed bearcat may have eaten you, social punishment for breaking taboos is in many ways a fate worse than death. You die only once but can be humiliated, harangued, and harassed countless times.

As such, fear is a pretty common warning that you are approaching a limit of some sort. It may be a fear that your work is not going to be as good as you wanted it to be or an absolute terror that some maniac is going to come burn your house down for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. The worst part about fear is in the moment, the terror of the theoretical maniac is just as bad as the fear that your work won't measure up. (This is where that 'False evidence appearing real' gets thrown around by lots of folks.) The trick is not dismissing your fear as something foolish. Something very real has laid the basis for this fear to rise up and it must be met with compassion.

When you are afraid, take time to reassure yourself. Take time to gently explore your fear and determine if it is pointing at a present problem, a past problem, or an anticipated problem. Only after you have determined what kind of problem the fear is pointing at do you decide your course of action. If it is a present problem, consider the resources you have available to solve it. If it is a past problem, make a note to address the concerns at a time when you feel safer to process the past issue so that it does not continue to be a source of fear. And if it is an anticipated problem, consider the weight of the potential problem and plan for how to handle it, provided it is a realistic looking future problem.