Fears Do Come True
A comforting letter for the insightful and scared.
As someone who is incredibly intuitive and quite good at recognizing patterns, I realize I have developed a sort of fear of my fears. Too many times, the things I have scribbled anxiously in my journal have actually come to pass with scary accuracy. It feels like Death Note, except nobody is getting murdered. Lately, I’ve been thinking about fear, especially fears about the future.
A lot of advice about handling these anxieties falls somewhere along the spectrum of gentle parenting ourselves (learning to tell the anxiety “I hear you, thank you for trying to protect me, but we’re okay”) to gaslighting ourselves (questioning the anxiety’s legitimacy based on its limited knowledge and confidence of the future). Either way, it’s an attempt to discount our anxieties and persuade ourselves that they’re untrue. And don’t get me wrong, we should always interrogate the narratives we default to, especially when they’re directed at ourselves uncharitably.
Nevertheless, I’ve observed that I can, in fact, be pretty spot on in my visions of what will transpire. So I’ve come to take them pretty seriously. I realize now, though, that those visions often lack context, and therein lies the issue. They are interpreted through the lens of what is now, but there are a million correlated factors that might change by the time that vision takes place in real life. Those factors then change what that vision actually is and how you feel about it.
It’s like in That’s So Raven, when Raven sees a vignette of the future but not the whole story. When the vision finally happens and she sees the context it’s happening in, its meaning usually changes. Our fears can be the same way. In some cases, I think fear can even be the fulfillment of a desire that our future selves have, but our current selves are not ready for or cannot fully understand.
We are oracles with emotional attachments.
Before I went full-time with my business, I talked a lot about how I was scared that going full-time would make me fall out of love with brand design. That the pressure to live off of my business would suck the fun out of it, and I would be more focused on the money than whether or not I was totally in love with the project in front of me. Lo and behold, this did come to pass, but it wasn’t the tragedy I thought it would be. This is because of the context around which it happened.
It is true that, today, I have become less passionate about brand design, and even less passionate about offering it as a service. I do find myself focused more on making my business profitable and learning to detach my emotions from those decisions. But, loosening my grip on brand design has come at the same time that I desire the space to discover what else I can be as an artist and entrepreneur. I wouldn’t be able to do that if I was still so attached to the brand design title.
Seeing my business for what it is — a tool to generate the funds I need to pay for the things I want in my life — is a necessary mental shift that has come at a time where my vision for life is expanding and becoming ever more clear (and expensive). My goals have evolved beyond being able to work with a “dream client”. I’m a bit tired of charging just enough to break even because I “love the work and would do it for free”. The desires that I now have—to start more businesses, to own and furnish a deeply intentional home, to travel, etc.— require me to leave the hobby and passion project mindset behind. This was the mindset that I was in when those fears originally came up for me. Of course it felt a bit scary at the time. In that moment, it wasn’t what I wanted.
My “fears”, when they finally came to be, manifested as points of growth. With that, I think I’m learning to change my relationship with fears of the future. I wonder, when these feelings come up, what would happen if I saw them as inklings of a version of myself that is on the way and who might actually lead me down a path that’s even more right for me?
Back to the lab,
Lola