I pay attention to fear because I’ve known it for much of my life. I’m always surprised at how much fear I have had and how much I encounter in the people I know and meet.

Fear is an important subject in my writing and my life.

Fear of putting oneself out there kills more love, happiness,  creativity and writing than any other thing I can think of.

To live a meaningful love, the choice was stark. I had to learn how to deal with fear.

When you are young, you have to learn how to feel safe to be safe and feel safe. If you weren’t taught,  you have to teach yourself. There are people who can help, and I found some.

I’ve learned how to make fear a smaller and less significant part of my life, to shrink it if you will.  It used to roar, now is squeaks once in a while. It can be done.

Fear is, to me a matter of geography, a space to cross.

There are real things in life to fear, but mostly I think,   fear has little connection with reality.  At least that was true for me. The things I most feared never happened, the things I never feared often did.

Most of the fear I have felt is internal, it is just not about the real world.

That is hard to see or believe when you’re in its grip. But it’s true. I had to face the truth about myself first.

For me, fear was about not knowing how to take care of myself, because no one ever took care of me. Fear  was about childhood traumas, it was about a broken neural system. When I should have been taught to feel safe, I was taught to be frightened.

This discovery about fear  was a big breakthrough for me.

So was writing about my fear in my books and on the blog. This is where I worked so much of it out and also where it began to shrink. In a way, I think this was why I started the blog and  became so dedicated to it.

A blog reader named Hazel (thank you, Hazel)  has read some of my writings about fear, this morning she send me this quote from a book called Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson, an author and neuropsychologist.

“Fear,” wrote Hanson, ” comes from the perceived gap between internal strengths and external challenges. As your sense of genuine strength grows, this gap will shrink, even to nothing. Strength does not mean getting puffed up or aggressive. Determination, tenacity, bending but not breaking, and integrity are forms of strength. So are enduring hard times  and surviving terrible ones.”

The most common definition of neurosis is fear or persistent worry about things that are not likely or real, or that might be considered unimportant. As Hanson wrote, fear is the gap between one’s own internal strength and the reality of the challenges coming from the outside world.

My mother lived in dread that I would be killed in a car accident while coming to visit her. If I was even a few minutes late she would begin dialing the police stations along the route I was taking, she memorized all the numbers.

This was a neurotic fear.

While it was certainly possible I could be in an accident, it was and is statistically unlikely. It was just a fear, a terror she carried inside of herself.  It was about her, not me. It was not real.

I never drank while driving, drove fast, or had far to go.

It was a neurotic fear.

Conquering fear is much about strengthening one’s own self, to balance our strength against the world beyond us. The stronger we are, the less frightened we will be of life. The less frightened we are, the more likely to find love, to be successful in our work,  and to live in peace and hope.

I worked on my strength by paying close attention to my fear, and  by changing the narrative of my life. I worked to rebuilt the part of my brain that was shaped around fear. I stopped looking backwards and stopped speaking poorly of my life.

I did this through therapy, visualization, meditation, and sometimes, medication.

Instead of being someone who was angry and terrified to go to school or take a gym class or deal with conflict and disappointment, I changed the story, I took up a different narrative. I slowly built up a battered ego.

I built a new story of my life. I let to of the past and ignored the future. I worked on the moment.

I worked every day to be authentic, to stand in my truth, my honesty, my strength. Being authentic is the greatest antidote to fear that I ran across. I learned to do good to feel good.

Sometimes fear can be helpful, but in my case, it was rarely truthful. As I balanced my new strength against fear, I saw the dreadful impact it had had on my life.

I came to experience the life I wanted, the life that fulfilled me, a life where love was an integral part of my existence, not just a hopeless yearning. I learned to run away from people mired in drama and self-pity, I learned to think about who I listened to, and who listened to me.

And yes, I was determined, and I was tenacious, I bent like a palm tree in a hurricane sometimes, but I did not break. My life is not perfect and will never be perfect. I  have endured hard times and terrible times.

When my friends ask me if there is really an end to fear, I say yes, sure. You have to believe there is another side to fear, and that if you keep working on it and enduring, you will come out of the dark cloud and find  yourself in an open field, and in the light.

The idea is not to have a perfect life – the impossible dream – but to have a life marked by  grace, which means you handle fear with courage and hope and will.

It does shrink, even vanish.