What would you do if you were not afraid?

27 / 08 / 2008

I’ve had some really crappy summers in my life, but this year’s takes the cake. I guess I had put too much hope in him, I guess I had put too much hope in me. Guessing is cheap.

Because in the end I’m not so strong, not so smart, not so brave. I’ve been wanting to screw things up for a long time and I never do in the end. I’m still there, playing the most eager chess game in my short history, and the problem is I never liked that game.

The last remarkable episode of my life has been really revealing. When someone who barely knows you decides -in a matter of days- that it’s better to walk away from you because what you’re conveying is simply tension, worry, anxiety (plus anything else you want to put here that rhymes with “being a stressed out fuck”) then it’s clear.

I’ve never considered myself either the most “worried” guy in the world or the most “worried” guy in the universe, quite the opposite: a normal person with gusts depending on the circumstances, depending on how much importance he attaches to “problems” at any given time.

But this summer has long since passed the “streak” category; I am physically and mentally broken, and soon I will have to use the other hand to continue counting the months that I cannot maintain a normal sleep cycle for more than two days in a row. Without going any further, right now it’s three in the morning, and here I am pressing keys… hopefully I’ll sleep a couple of hours today.

As I said a few posts ago, what has happened is that a lot of things have come together for me at the moment I least needed it, but that is not the ultimate cause of all this, I know that and I am not going to keep kidding myself any longer: all this stress is a product of my fear.

Yes, my fear. The fear of finally making the decisions that would take me out of my comfort zone, beyond the threshold of a simple one-time effort to reach a goal of no excessive relevance in my life. The fear of change, the fear of being wrong, the fear of being right. Fear, fear, fear.

It’s ironic now that at the beginning of this summer I sent an email to two of my best friends with a very simple question -what would you do if you weren’t afraid?- to which I even had an answer.

I have limited myself to choosing the most “convenient” option at all times and I have forgotten to listen to my heart’s desires, to live life as I would really like to live it. But it turns out that everything has a price, and the price of this supposed “security” is no other than assuming slowly and agonizingly that by these means I will end my days begging for an extra life.