Category: Blogging

Handling Fear & Self-Doubt

Daily writing prompt
How do you handle fear and self-doubt?
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Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels

Handling fear and self-doubt, for me, come down to understanding what these really are in moments I feel them.

Fear should be a useful and intelligent emotion that results in safety and remaining alive and well. It may not be a pleasant feeling in the moment, but it is valuable and a signal not to be ignored. Over time, wisdom and experience helps refine fear into a sharp tool of benefit we thoughtfully listen to.

Self-doubt is a finicky emotion, often masquerading as other deeper emotions or histories needing further contemplation. When I doubt myself, I try to examine it and peel back a layer to see what is underneath the lack of confidence in myself. Is it having to untangle a long history of being made to believe I was wrong when I really right? Is it a deeper experience that long ago made me lose faith in myself? Or could it be an easy avoidance to doing the next right thing?

Mainly, handling emotions like these come down to understanding the feelings and seeing them for what they are / are not, instead of drowning in an ocean of anxiety and overwhelm.

Taste the Apples

Photo by Tom Swinnen via Pexels

Welcome! I am setting up shop to combine several blogs that span many years with the posts of the present. I used other sites from the past to capture different seasons of life. It felt right, back then, to start fresh each time with a new site and a new outlook. But here I am in middle age wanting to string it all together.

Maybe it’s age or perhaps it is a desire to steer towards calmer waters after a tumultuous last few years. I seek joy, peace, and wisdom more than anything else nowadays. Sometimes we find ourselves wanting to look back and reflect. We know more with gained experience and can look back with thoughtful hindsight.

I may never check off all the items on my bucket list and I may never have my own children to pass things down to. But I have lived these stories. And I am still journeying; sometimes with the fellowship of others and sometimes in solitude. But until the posts stop, I will keep doing the very best I can as I experience as much as I can, as best I can.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum