Thursday! 3-20: The Voice of Fear, Which We Shall Not Heed
I3, E20
This one’s going to be a bit longer than normal, but I think you’ll like where we end up. Ready? Steady? Go!
My friend Sarah Werner wrote a very good essay about bravery and “doing the thing” that has stuck with me pretty hard all day1. Let me quote a bit:
Just like bravery won’t strike like lightning, your fear isn’t going to just magically dissolve one day. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly not be afraid to do the thing you’re afraid to do today.
The fear is always going to be there between you and the thing, especially if the thing is worth doing. And that really sucks.
But it also means that what you’re doing is important.
She makes a point we should hear a lot more often, and from people other than the “hustle bros” who just discovered the writings of Marcus Aurelius six months ago. Bravery isn’t just about girding your loins2, laughing in the face of danger, and charging into the face of the horde3. Bravery is also, or even mostly, about taking a single step into the unknown. That’s it. One step. Of course, taking that step is hard, but it is doable, which is the point of Sarah’s newsletter this week (so go read it and then subscribe).
I’d like to take up where her quote leaves off.
Do you know what creative fear really is? It’s your brain trying very hard to protect you because, from its point of view, you’re safe. You can’t feel the ache of rejection if you don’t move. You can’t risk getting lost or falling and failing if you don’t take a step into the unknown. Steven Pressfield calls this fear “The Resistance”. He describes it as a protector of the status quo and the thing that prevents artists from becoming the proud professionals4 we ought to be. Fear, to him, has a voice.
Seth Godin has heard that voice, often enough to know what it says almost by heart.
The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.
You’ve heard that voice, too, haven’t you? I know I have. Heck. I’ve listened to that voice for longer than I can remember. What’s worse, I’d obeyed that voice for more years than I care to admit. The fear voice was my most trusted counselor, the Grima Wormtongue whispering in my ear and poisoning my heart. Of course, the fear voice didn’t come from outside. The fear voice was part of me just like your fear voice is part of you. That’s why it speaks so convincingly and always seems to know the most tender and vulnerable spots to hit.
[Won’t you be my Patron? At $2, $5, or $20 you can support my work, my art, and get the occasional exclusive bonus goodie as easy as pie. Thank you!]
Here’s the thing. You don’t have to listen. Oh, sure, the voice is close and it’s saying true things. But true is not always best. It is true that if you get out of your car, which is stalled on the train tracks, you might trip on the rail and take a horrible tumble. Is that best, though? Isn’t it best to risk that danger in order not to get run over by a train? Well, sure it is. Your fear voice, though, isn’t looking that far ahead. Your fear voice is looking at right now, and only at right now. Its initial purpose was to keep you safe from immediate physical threats. It doesn’t look a week into the future and weigh a present risk against a potential future calamity. The Resistance doesn’t play the long game.
You, however, need to play the long game because your art is important? Oh, don’t you dare frown at me but because you did pull that face at me, I’m going to say it again, even louder.
YOUR ART IS IMPORTANT.
Your art is important to you as an artist. If you don’t make your art, it’s going to bottle up inside you and curdle. It’ll hurt you in ways you can’t imagine right now. You might think you can take it, but, believe me from direct personal experience, you don’t want what will come of “taking it” in a couple years. You need to make your art so that you may become who you are meant to be — whatever that is. You don’t have to be a 40-hour professional either. You do have to be a working artist.
The key here is “working”. Art can be scary. You’re taking a part of your heart and putting it on a page or a canvas or singing it to someone or carving it out of wood. You may only reach a couple people with your art and that will feel like diminishment and failure. It’ll feel like what you do isn’t that big a deal. But it is. To the people you reach, to the people who wait for your next story or newsletter or podcast episode or whatever, it is a big deal. You’ve made a connection that simply doesn’t happen every day, all the time. That is important and it deserves the work you put into it. You are worthy of that work. They — no matter how many they are — are worthy of it as well. You can — and should — put in that work no matter how inspired you feel or how discouraged. It is important.
I will be honest with you. I get discouraged a lot when I see that only a few people — almost never more than a dozen — ever read my poems. I tend to feel like the work I put in isn’t worth it. My fear voice gets loud with “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?” I’m learning not to listen, though, because my fear voice is wrong. My art is worth my work, for me and for you.
My fear voice will tell me otherwise, but I don’t have to listen. Neither do you.
What I Wrote Last Week
Sometimes you just feel the need to channel your inner Weird Al and write a parody of something you admire, right? Right?
Fancy a story or poem? Read all you want at JimmieWrites.
Buy my picture book of poems about werewolves and atomic monsters!
Read “The Paper Swans of Ellendell” in Postcards from Mars!
ONE LAST THING! Down under the footnotes is a little empty heart. I’d like it a lot if you’d click on it. There’s no guarantee it’ll do anything besides turn all red and happy, but you never know. Maybe Substack will tell more people about Thursday! if we all click the heart. Let’s see.
Like the bubble gum on the bottom of your shoe, or a particularly hungry lamprey. But, you know, good. A happy, friendly lamprey.
If you ever find yourself in a loin-girding situation, here’s how you do it. You will need to be wearing some sort of loose, flowing tunic for best results, though.
Oddly enough, bravery is almost never about that. Most soldiers don’t even have to show that kind of bravery. We’ve made that the exemplar of bravery because it is the most obvious and stirring example, but it doesn’t happen often, even to people in the business of horde-charging.
If you follow that link, you’ll find he isn’t talking about “professional” in the sense of doing art as a job, though you may find yourself doing just that. He’s talking about being a professional in habit and attitude. Read on. I’m getting there.
I really like the idea here of "protecting" your future self by writing NOW. 40-year-old us may be upset that 20-year-old us didn't create more, but we can still make 80-year-old us proud.
I read Sarah’s eNewsletter too and it resonated with me as yours does today. Here’s my take on “who” I’m writing for. But first, a step back: yesterday, when I checked the views of my blog posts over the past week or so, I felt discouraged and “that voice” said: what’s the point? But then my spirit whispered: remember who you are stewarding your time and talents for—an audience of One. Ahhhh. That, to me, is all that matters. And He gets to choose how my words will be heard and by whom. Thanks Jimmie 🤗