How To Make Fear A Thing of The Past

Last updated on November 6th, 2019 at 01:57 am

This week I decided to ask my husband what his big dream is.

He told me that he wants to build a classic car. Or, I should say, rebuild a classic car. He recently acquired a 1956 Pontiac and has been tinkering with it almost every day. I have been married to this man for 23 years; I should have known the answer to this question.

The truth is that I did know rebuilding a car was something he wanted to do I just didn’t know how important it is to him. I was surprised when I asked him if he had a big dream and he answered, “Yes.”  I was shocked by the dream itself. I was even more flabbergasted that I had never asked him about his big dreams before.

I’m sure by now you are wondering how this is relevant to my dream. As I sat in stunned silence, staring at him as though he were somehow new and different, I began to have this niggling little thought. And then it grew, as niggling little thoughts tend to do, into something bordering on an idea.

I think we can all agree that we do not pay enough attention to our own dreams. If we did we would all be happily moving forward in our lives, completely ignorant of the possibility of life less lived. The sun would always be shining, the birds always singing, everything would always go your way, and there would never be another skunk under my house.

All of my 8 Women Dream articles of the past weeks started to float around in my head.

Could it be that in order to achieve my own dreams I need to pay more attention to the dreams of those I love?

Is it possible that to hear my own wants and desires I need to open myself up to hearing the wants and desires of others?

I have known for a long time that I am a person who lacks compassion and that I can be very selfish. I am not proud of these things but they are true just the same. (This is not wallowing just statements of fact.) I believe these traits were born not out of self-absorption or lack of human emotion but from many years of deflection.

I started wondering what I could do differently. How could I be different? How could I be more…there?

And then it happened.

You know that moment when somewhere deep inside your mind there is an audible click so loud you are sure everyone else could hear it? It was there, loud and clear. What I imagine to be the sound of church bells ringing in a small village town on a clear summer day.

The deflection, selfishness and the lack of compassion, they are the walls that I have built. Okay, that part is not earth-shattering news to anyone who has ever sought the help of a therapist. We all have a story to tell. Something that happened at some point in our lives that changed us, that helped to shape us into the person we are today.

I have had the idea to write my story since I was 16-years-old. I have stopped myself time and again because I don’t have any burning desire to hurt my family.

All of these things went through my mind as I sat looking at my husband and thinking about what has stopped him from achieving his dream. Sometimes we are stopped by things that are outside of our perceived control. For him it was money. He needed to change his perception.

While it is true that it can cost a lot of money to rebuild a classic car that money does not all have to be spent in one fell swoop. So, he is tinkering and he is happy.

I have been stopped by fear.

Fear of hurting someone that I love maybe even myself. But, I think the reason I have not moved forward in my dream is that I may be trying to achieve the wrong one. Oh, I think it is still writing but a little different than I had imagined.

I am going to begin working on writing my story.

So, wish me luck in visiting my past.  Wish me the strength to deal with my family and all of our feelings.

Here’s a video on dealing with fear —

Dawnda

Dawnda’s dream was to get some piece of writing published in 2009.  She left the 8 Women Dream group in 2009 to focus on finding full-time employment.