It's strange how life sometimes throws up themes at you. These consistent questions or reminders that seem to stay with us for a time until we either resolve the underlying problem or the universe just gives up on trying to teach us a lesson.
The thematic stream in my life right now seems to be, "What are you afraid of?" Good Lord, the list goes on and on. I could start by simply saying spiders, but that's such a 'surface' fear that it practically makes a mockery of the question. So let's look deeper... let's try to dig our way through the morass of paranoia and psychoses...deep down to the real core of our fears. There's one thing lurking there, but it's a thing of many different faces. It's the fear of failure.
You may ask, how can failure have many different faces? You either fail or succeed. That's true... to an extent but failure can have many different flavours, psychologically. There is the obvious: I've failed to complete a task, I've failed to do my job successfully. These failure fears are relatively easy to overcome and are comparatively small in nature when measured against other failure fears.
The others I speak of are things like the fear of leaving your job to pursue something completely different. Something so utterly outside of one's frame of reference that you simply cannot imagine how you might succeed in it. Hence you fear nothing but failure from undertaking this. I have recently had such a proposition put to me and I truly do not know which way to turn. It's fair to say I'm quite disillusioned with my current job. I would like to find something new, something to re-ignite the excitement of doing a job well. I don't wish to sound egotistical but I'm very good at my job. I know that many people appreciate what I do to help them but there are also a lot of people who just seem, whether they do it consciously or not, to have a lack of understanding and appreciation for what I do.
So I do want a change, but to this? I feel.... vastly unqualified... unworthy even and, if I'm being truly honest, extremely self-conscious about what others will say and/or think. I know what some would say; Who cares what others think as long as you're happy. But we do, don't we? We do care what some people think. We like to feel respected. We like to believe that people don't think us weird or a freak or worse... a blindly self-righteous fool. And surely the people who might think that are not worth having in our lives but these people are friends. We have a connection, we enjoy them and their company. After all, there's a reason that they became our friends in the first place, right?
Well, people change. Life changes us. I'm certainly not the same man I was 10, even 5 years ago. If I can change so dramatically then so can these friends. What if the change is so great that we simply have lost that connection that we once shared? Hmmm, failure. The failure to maintain a friendship. The failure to understand this person that you've known for so long. Maybe, without even embarking on this change in my life that has been proposed, just maybe that change between people who were once my friends and me has already taken place? Or would take place anyway? Should I put my entire life on hold merely to find out?
Of course not. What a waste of time that would be. But still, that fear lurks deeply in me and slowly eats away at my confidence and, in so doing, affects my sense of self-worth. I don't believe I'm good enough to achieve what has been placed before me. My fear of failure has broken my spirit before I've even given myself a chance to find out. It's like I'm David facing my own personal Goliath but whereas David confidently stepped up and hurled his stone, felling the giant before him, I don't even trust that I could load the stone right.
I cower in the shadow of this Goliath; this fear of failure - this fear of letting others down, for that is another face of failure. I'm so utterly terrified that I cannot turn and fight, nor can I run away. I am paralysed and so I simply stand there staring at the giant constantly questioning without ever making any progress. Does this inability to confront my fear, to try to put it aside, justify my feelings? If I'm not prepared to make a decision on this, should the decision not be given to me to make? That way I cannot fail for there's nothing to fail at. But then I've simply created a new problem.
Am I content to go through life in my safe, comfortable little bubble? Never trying anything, never taking a risk simply so that I know I can never fail? All I've done is place another Goliath in front of the original one. I've doubled the barriers that I have to work through and that's stupid. That's no way to live. But it's So. Damn. Hard. for me to not think this way.
This is what I'm afraid of. Damn you, Goliath.
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