The Cost of Avoiding What Scares You

Last week I was invited to a casual dinner for Porter with some of the kids and moms from his new school. It was an invitation I should have been thrilled to receive. I am so excited about this next chapter for him, and for us. But before I could even feel the excitement, I felt dread. The dinner itself was not the problem, and neither were the people or the awkwardness of walking into a new group. I felt dread because I knew I would have to get there, and getting there meant confronting one of my biggest fears: driving.

If you spend time out east, you know this is almost embarrassing to admit. It is one of the easiest places to drive. The roads are open, the traffic is nothing like the city, and yet the two-way highway terrifies me. I can trace the fear back. I know where it came from, and I understand the experiences that helped create it. But lately I have been wondering whether knowing why matters as much as I once thought it did. There comes a point when the explanation is no longer the missing piece. You can understand a fear beautifully and still continue arranging your entire life around it.

That is what I had been doing. I could Uber. I could get a ride. I could coordinate with someone who was already going, change the timing, or find another way. I almost always did find another way, which meant I still went to the dinners and saw the friends and lived a life that looked free from the outside. The workaround worked so well that it allowed me to avoid naming what it was costing me. I was functional. I was resourceful. I rarely missed anything.

But every workaround kept the fear intact.

I think that is how fear quietly becomes part of the architecture of a life. It does not always forbid you from doing anything. Sometimes it simply asks you to make a hundred small adjustments so you never have to come directly up against it. Eventually those adjustments stop feeling like fear and start feeling like your personality, your preferences, or the practical way you have chosen to live. You say, “I am just not someone who does that,” when the truth may be that you have not practiced becoming someone who does.

The fence becomes difficult to see because it is made from solutions rather than obvious restrictions.

This particular fear keeps me stuck physically, because there are places I cannot easily go on my own, but it also keeps me stuck mentally. The woman I know I am becoming drives. She does it confidently, and she actually enjoys it. She puts Porter in the car and goes somewhere because the day is beautiful. She takes a road trip. She decides at four o’clock that she wants to be somewhere by six and does not first need to know who else is driving. She is not white-knuckling the steering wheel and congratulating herself for surviving. She has the windows down. She is free.

That is the part that made this impossible to keep joking about. I talk about becoming your future self, making decisions from the life you want, and refusing to let your current comfort zone be the only authority in the room. Yet here was a place where I kept talking, analyzing, and making jokes without taking any meaningful action. I wanted the identity without doing the physical practice that would create it. I wanted to be the woman who drives, but I had not been willing to become a beginner at driving again. This summer I decided I was no longer willing to stay stuck there.

I do not think I am alone in this. Most of us have something we have learned to live around so efficiently that we no longer recognize it as a limitation. Maybe it is the business you keep researching instead of starting, the rate you know you need to raise, the conversation you keep rehearsing without having, or the work you keep perfecting in private because being seen still feels too exposed. Maybe you keep telling yourself that the right moment has not arrived, when really you have built a life in which the moment never has to arrive.

The workaround keeps you safe enough to function, but it also keeps the future version of you theoretical.

At some point, awareness has done all it can do. There is no version of me who sits in the house until I feel completely comfortable driving and then gets behind the wheel. The order is the opposite. I get behind the wheel before I feel ready, I drive a little farther than I did before, and I give my body new evidence. I do not have to conquer the entire highway in one sweeping act. I have to stop handing every decision back to the version of me whose only evidence is what I have already done.

That is what I think becoming your future self really is. Your future self does not arrive to rescue you because you imagined the picture vividly enough. That version of you stops feeling imaginary because you keep making ordinary choices from that perspective. Every time you take the road, send the email, say the thing, or walk into the room without shrinking, you collect proof that your identity is changing.

Confidence is not the admission price. Confidence is what grows after you have given yourself enough evidence to believe something new.

Six months from now is coming either way. By then I can still be explaining why I am afraid to drive, still making excellent arrangements, still laughing about it as though it is simply one of my charming limitations. Or I can be someone who gets into the car and goes. The difference will not be one extraordinary moment. It will be the small decisions I make on ordinary days when nobody is watching and nothing about me feels especially brave. The same is true for whatever you thought of while reading this. You already know the place where you have been arranging your life around fear. The more important question is whether you are ready to stop.

As I was finishing writing this, I realized something. I could not write an entire essay about becoming the woman who drives and then find another way to get to the dinner. So I got in the car.

I was scared. My heart was beating faster than usual. My hands were tight on the steering wheel. I was not calm, fearless, enlightened, or transformed. But I drove.

And, as is so often the case, nothing extraordinary happened. I arrived. The roads were exactly the same roads they had been the day before. But I was different because I had given myself new evidence. I think that is the part we miss when we talk about becoming our future selves. We imagine some sweeping transformation, but most of the time the change is much smaller than that.

You simply decide that an old story is no longer going to be the thing making your decisions for you, and then you do the thing until you realize you have become someone new.

On August 8 at 10 a.m. ET, I am hosting a live Lion’s Gate Portal journaling session for paid subscribers. We will connect with ourselves six months from now, close enough to see the moves we need to start making and the ones we need to stop.

Below: why the workaround feels like wisdom, the practice I am using to get myself back on the road, and everything you need to join me live on August 8.