Facing fear… One of, if not the scariest phrase a person with anxiety/panic will ever hear or utter. Just the concept of it, can send a shiver up our spine. Yet at the same time it is our freedom and almost the bane to our existence.
At least for me it was so true. There is a saying that to get through our fears we must confront them. For the longest time, I always hated that phrase. And how for an anxious person it is just not possible. Yet I could not have been more wrong. Or as Chandler Bing would say, could I BE more wrong?
To get to where I am now in my life and my journeys I had to face my fears. That was the biggest hurdle I had to climb over and the biggest thing that could have ended this journey before it even started. For me to go anywhere to do anything I had to face my fears head on. I had to make the attempt to go forward with this. I had to choose to want to do this and choose to go out there. I had to take the proverbial plunge so to speak.
The one thing I have learned through all of this was that those fears were always worse in my head. As was the case of when I rode the Metro by my self, or when I went on vacation by myself. Those fears and scary moments were all worse in my head than was ever remotely close to the reality of it all. It is those fears, those anxieties, that really blow out of proportion that was more in our heads than they are in reality. It is those anxieties and fears that exist outside of the moment we are trying to be in. They are in the future of what we think is going to happen before we even get there. As such I learned it was that future thinking that really created so much anxiety and fear in me, as I was not living in the present. When I would face these fears and anxieties I was able to see them for what the truly were and was able to get past them and able to keep moving forward with my journeys and adventures to new and exciting places and experiences.
The biggest thing I had to do with all of this was to take that first step. To go out beyond what I thought I was capable of and just go and do it. I started small and went some where local, and worked my way up to something much larger and further and longer, and I will one day go even further than that. All because I tried and I took that first step and faced my fears.