If I Wasn't Afraid...
“If I wasn’t afraid… if I wasn’t afraid…” she clenched her eyes and sagged against the concrete column on the busy New York streets.
Again, and again, hounded by the cacophony that this one question could make. Well-meaning friends, already easily successful celebrities, over and over and over again, as if it was just that easy: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
“But I am… I just am”. The weight of the past few weeks pressed into her head and onto her shoulders. The weight of trying, the weight of “doing better”, the weight of searching for more. Why couldn’t she just answer the question? Why was it so.. damn… hard…
If I wasn’t afraid… maybe I’d open up the company?
Or if I wasn’t afraid… maybe I’d write that damn book?
Or if I wasn’t afraid… would I simply just go tell my boss to fuck off?
The bus pulled up, spraying a deluge of rainwater from the puddles onto the sidewalk. She stood up and trudged away from the column, onto the bus and slumped onto a seat. Such is life…
Is this really my life?
Surely. There is more..
Anita hadn’t stopped looking for more, hadn’t stopped soul-searching, working on herself and trying to improve. The one thing she knew she didn’t want, she knew she was afraid of.. was kind of what was happening… a life of drudgery, a life of being a cog in someone else’s dream.. and yet here she was, somehow stuck in the hamster wheel of her parents’ life. Why the fuck was this happening.
The next morning, the alarm beeped incessantly. Without opening her eyes, Anita lay in bed, willing herself to get up into the cold air and deal with another day of life
“What if I wasn’t afraid… what if I wasn’t afraid… what if I wasn’t afraid” she murmured to herself over, and over, and over again.
“What would I even do?”
She opened her eyes and looked at her surroundings… and this time, she really looked.
At the wallpaper peeling from the walls, the damp that was accumulating in the corner of the room, the fixtures hanging off her drawers that the landlord continuously promised that he would have fixed… soon.
She looked, and she saw, and she remembered last night on the bus.
She looked, and she saw, and she saw what she had always been afraid of.
She was living small. She was living the cycle.
If this is the worst, already occurring, well then what the fuck am I doing?
It didn’t matter her answer to “What if I wasn’t afraid…”. That answer had pretty much already perpetuated itself in her convolutions to answer it perfectly.
It just mattered that she did something, and then allowed that to lead.
She had opened her eyes to what she’d always been trying to manage against… and realized it was already in front of her….
It’s not “what would she do if she wasn’t afraid”, it was “why not do it, cos I’ll be afraid anyway?”