Facing the Fear of Failing

 It's always interesting to see how different people react to failing. Some fight harder and better, others are completely crushed, and some other lucky ones seem to float through life on a pink cloud of success.

Lovely Simona posted something on her blog a while ago about confidence and it got me thinking.

Because, if there's one thing that I slightly lack then it's confidence. Something else has taken its place: stress.

I don't cope well with stress. Whenever I'm faced with it I tend to hide or run from it as fast as possible. Hell, I was so stressed out that I nearly suffered a nervous breakdown and ran to the other side of the world to pick up the pieces.

It worked and it was the best decision of my life, though it's hardly something I could do every time something went wrong, right? Admittedly my trip was the result of many different factors but one of the biggest ones still remains that I had a bit of a mental breakdown.

But as I said, I don't have a very good coping mechanism when it comes to stress and pressure. It makes me feel small and unimportant. It's not a nice feeling to have at all. It always gets the better of me and it has caused me to fail a lot over the past few years. This failure only adds oil to an already wildly spreading fire and I've realised that I was in a bit of a vicious circle of stress and failure. I have now developed a massive fear for failing. I mean, everyone fears failing, but there's a healthy amount of fear and then the kind that just paralyzes me and makes the decisions for me instead. I've shed many tears, more in the last 5 years than in the rest of my entire lifetime. Just goes to show how strong of an emotion fear can be. And once you allowed it to take over, it festers in a lot of little things, it looms over you and tells you to sit in the passenger seat while it drives.

It wasn't until I decided to take matters back into my own hands that I started to feel better again.

I told  you that I practically ran to the other side of the world to disappear from everything that was troubling me. I could literally feel myself relax the moment I set foot in this other country. A country that is so incredibly different from my own that it felt like I could be anyone that I wanted to be. I could be brave and strong and confident. I could be the better version of me.
And in theory that's a brilliant idea unless your escape plan has an expiration date of 6 months and playing hide and seek is no longer an option anymore. No, I had to face what troubled me or let go of things that were but shouldn't be troubling me. I did just that. I was back living in the now and not in the what-ifs. It was such a relief. I felt free and unburdened. I was finally back doing the driving.
I had literally thrown myself into the unknown and it had given me back a piece of myself that I had lost somewhere along the way of growing up. It were my experiences and the people over there that had slowly healed me again and I am eternally grateful that I got the opportunity to do what I did, because I know not everyone is that lucky.

It's not surprising that I wasn't looking forward to coming  back. I might have found myself again in a world completely different from mine, but what would happen if I came back to everything I had left behind.

Surprisingly enough, I noticed a change in the way I approached things. I knew what I wanted in my life and I had gained a whole new range of skills to help me through it.

I sound so positive don't I? And I have been feeling much more positive for most of the time. I didn't have to go back to internships and university life for another 6 months and I could focus solely on editing my novel. It was a nice change from the constant stress I had endured a year before.

Only I got stuck with my editing process, frustrated with my story and characters, wanting to change the entire thing, and D-day (back to internship) was fast approaching. I felt a familiar enemy creep back in. Fear. Fear for failing again, fear for going through another stress breakdown, and fear of being a crappy writer. I wanted to run away again. Only this time I couldn't. So I did what I had learnt on my latest trip: Facing the unfamiliar and dealing with it head on. And now my life seems to finally back on the right track!

For starters, I have now been going strong at my internship for 3 weeks and am feeling incredibly at ease. My mentor is absolutely lovely and unbelievably supportive. I have a hiccup every once in a while where I still get a bit overwhelmed, but I'm dealing with it in a much healthier way than I did before.

But I also found a few people I could confide in when it came to my novel. Who would give me honest feedback and tell me exactly what was wrong with it and what was good. It fueled my editing senses and I have now a finished manuscript, have sent it to the same people for one last check and then I am kind of hoping to start submitting it. It might not get accepted by anyone, but that's something I'll deal with when it happens.

For now, I am focusing on what makes me happy and what I want from my life. I have many dreams and fantasies. Some are more realistic than others, but I can at least try and achieve as many as possible. And if there's one piece of advice I could give to anyone out there (still) reading this, then it's to not give fear the upper-hand! You deserve to be the one driving the wheel and fight for what you want. I don't want to downplay anyone who is suffering with anxiety and panic attacks on a daily basis, they go through a different battle like I did but if anyone is out there currently feeling like they are being driven instead of driving themselves, you are more than welcome to message me if you are in need of talking about it!