the fear.
how it stops me from living a life i'm worthy of.
Fear has been a prevalent topic in my life recently. I tend to forget that the anxiety I feel on an almost-daily basis is anything but normal and in a conversation with my psychoanalyst last week, he emphasised that living a life riddled with anxiety on a daily basis is a life of low quality and oftentimes, it can feel like no life at all.
Coming across a prompt by
on fear feels like perfect timing. I find that if the same word keeps coming up around me, in this case “fear”, there is something that needs to be dissected and looked into because that’s usually my Higher Power asking me to pause and reflect.Sari of Memoir Land has asked that the prompts not be shared so to respect that, I won’t regurgitate the whole thing. However, I love me a good prompt, especially in times like these where my mind feels like it’s bursting with ideas but structuring them is the challenge I’m facing currently.
“What are your eating habits telling you?” My counsellor asks me in a session that ended in tears today.
Since entering recovery, I’ve gained 10kg. I cannot stop eating sugar, on a compulsive level. It’s what I look forward to at the end of the day—my sugar binge usually conveniently timed after I’ve taken my night meds.
Noticing my hesitation in responding, my counsellor asks: “Just two weeks ago, you had no self-esteem and you were convinced that everyone disliked you. And now this. Perhaps, you are creating a barrier between you and others because the more you dislike yourself, the less others disliking you can hurt you. The more weight you gain, the more you dislike yourself.”
As usual, I really didn’t believe it was that deep. But at the same time, it makes so much sense.
“It’s funny,” I say. “That’s exactly what I was writing about in my Substack today.”
The fear of rejection
I know, I’m choosing a rather intangible but massive fear here. I’ve decided to go with rejection because it is prevalent in so many aspects of my life. My fear of rejection shows up in my career, my relationships, my every-day interactions with the world. It informs the way I show up in my life and the amount of risk I’m willing to take in both the big and the small. My behaviour changes depending on the scale of my fear of rejection in any given moment. Honestly, I find it much easier to not try than to be rejected. I find it far safer to control the outcome by essentially self-sabotaging myself into rejection because it’s much easier to know that I’ve been rejected as a result of my actions, not necessarily because of who I am.
This fear started off as a rational one. When I was a child and rejection for the out-of-the-box character I was happened to be my almost daily experience, I could protect myself through this fear and the projection that came with it. If I rejected myself first, there was no way that anyone else could. This carried me into high school, where I was surrounded by beautiful friends who were way more desirable than I was. By assuming that no one could ever like me as I was, I shut myself off to the possibility of rejection by never assuming that I, for once, was the recipient of a silly, little crush. To this day, casual little flirtations aren’t enough for me to get the picture. My inclination isn’t to assume someone likes me, the only way I might find out is if they directly inform me that they have their eye on me. It makes for some super awkward experiences — I reject before I can be rejected.
Nowadays, I consider the fear of rejection to be completely irrational. I mean, how can the word no bother me so much? This word has the power to break me and shrink myself into a shrivelled ball of wasted potential. Like, why do I believe that it can hurt me? But that’s often what I think of it. The instinct to protect myself from this two-letter word has stopped me from applying for opportunities or even sending a text to the opposite sex—lest I seem too clingy and therefore, rejected.
I know, I know. The girl math is mathing. But to me, it makes sense. Any chance of “I’m not interested” or “thanks, but no thanks” has the likelihood of breaking me. This fear is so a part of me. It’s so instinctual that separating it from myself is difficult.
Who am I without my fear?
My fear makes me super polite. It allows me to stay small, to keep myself in a place where no one can see me and therefore, rejection is no longer imminent. I get scared to ask for things, things that I may even deserve. My counsellor literally laughed at me when she enquired about an opportunity I wanted to get and I told her that I was scared that I will look greedy (as I already have one opportunity with them).
“Can you imagine, those multimillionaires that own the company sitting down and talking about how Tendani asked for an opportunity that’s beneficial for everyone involved and how greedy she is for asking!”
I know it’s insane but currently it doesn’t feel unreasonable to think this. My fear of rejection extends beyond hearing “no”, it goes into an area of fearing what I already have being taken away from me. That is what my fear feels like.
The fearless me is entirely different. When I’m not fearful, I do this weird thing where I back myself. I ask for things unapologetically—the asking a result of being certain that I’m likely to receive a yes—and I treat my presence or service as a gift that is worthy of compensation. And when I hear no? Well, the thing is, I don’t die. Which is surprising.
Living without fear won’t come overnight.
But I can practice being fearless and deal with the repercussions after the fact. Because the truth is, my thought process is insane right now. I can’t trust my own thinking. And that’s okay. I’m getting there — one day at a time. For now, I’m going to fake it ‘til I make it and hope for the best.
