Do what scares you

Like many people in these COVID streets (or Zooms, more aptly), I've been thinking lately about ways to make money that I control and 2 have come to mind lately. 

While I have no trouble making risky professional and scholarly decisions, there's something about the money that gives me deer-in-headlights kinds of fear and anxiety.

• What if no one likes my ideas?
• What if all I do is waste time and money?
• What if I'm thought foolish?
• What if it doesn't work?
• What if no one cares?

Having an entrepreneur partner is making me feel worse. He takes things I'm ready to hide under a table just thinking about as a matter of course in his daily life and has trouble understanding why everyone isn't striking out on their own.

I wish I could just redirect my anxiety at him and tell him to be more supportive of my struggle, but the reality is that I agree with everything he says. In concept.

It's the execution that scares me.

And leaning into the fear makes me realize that I a) don't often feel this kind of fear, and b) when I do, I make myself do that which scares me just so I can see what all the fear is really about. That approach may in fact be how I ended up with a PhD doing research on structural racism.

So I'm going to probably take a couple of days in solitude (do I even really need to get away if what I want is solitude? Nah; corona. But still. I haven't even seen a beach this year and the Sag in me is screaming about it.) to think and breathe and jump into yet another black hole because apparently that's what I'm into. Besides, if 2020 is teaching us humans anything, it's that there's another black hole of [insert thing you never thought you'd have to deal with] something right around the corner.

​Adulting is scary and often tiring.