Welcome to Into Many Things! A newsletter about designing a life you love and actually want to live. I happen to believe, maybe a little stubbornly, that a good life is possible. Glad you’re here.
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Do you know what I’ve realized about fear?
It doesn’t go away.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to stop us either.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because a month from now my family and I are moving to Porto and I am scared. To be honest, my fear seems to be growing in direct proportion to how close the move is getting.
When you think about it, we usually treat fear as a warning sign. If we’re scared, we assume something must be wrong. We tell ourselves, “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.” The weird part is that in my case that doesn’t really make sense. I don’t have to be afraid of moving abroad because I’ve done it before. I know it will be worth it. I've rebuilt my life from scratch in different countries. I've navigated visas, apartment searches, job hunts, homesickness, and all the other challenges that come with starting over somewhere new. If anything, I should be better at this than I was ten years ago. Which is what makes this so interesting to me. Because when I think back to one of the biggest decisions I’ve ever made, I remember feeling significantly less afraid.
Looking back, the decision to move to Canada back then made very little sense. I moved with a six-month visa and a job that paid considerably less than the one I had left behind. I didn’t know whether I would be able to stay. I didn’t know whether any of it would work out. I certainly didn’t have the kind of plan that most people would consider responsible. I should have been scared but I wasn’t. afraid.
So, why am I afraid now? Shouldn’t the fact that it all worked out be proof for me that I can do this again? Some of the most important things in my life only exist because I moved. My marriage exists because I moved to Canada. My daughter exists because I moved to Canada.
Entire chapters of my life exist because of a decision that looked questionable from almost every practical angle. And I don’t think that’s unique to me. I think most of us can point to moments where our lives changed because we decided to act even though we were afraid. Fear can show us everything that might go wrong. It can show us rejection, failure, disappointment, uncertainty and discomfort. What it can’t show us are the people we’ll meet, the opportunities we’ll stumble into, the experiences we’ll have, or the lives we’ll build because we decided to go anyway.
And maybe that’s why “do it scared” is actually much better advice than it sounds.
For a while, I assumed I was scared because the stakes are higher. I’m a parent now. We’re not moving with two suitcases anymore. We’re moving an entire household. This isn’t a temporary experiment or another chapter in a long series of moves abroad. Of course that feels different. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. We tend to assume that experience should make us more confident. After all, confidence is supposed to come from evidence, and I have far more evidence now than I did ten years ago. If confidence were purely rational, this move should feel easier than the one to Canada.
But maybe experience doesn’t just teach confidence. Maybe it also teaches awareness.
When I moved to Canada in my twenties, I didn’t know most of the things that could go wrong because I had never experienced them before. I didn’t know how exhausting uncertainty could feel when it stretched on for months. Now I know more. I can imagine more scenarios. I can see more complications. And maybe that’s part of what happens as we get older. We become so much better at imagining everything that could go wrong that we start mistaking those possibilities for probabilities. The result is a strange paradox. The more capable we become, the easier it can be to talk ourselves out of difficult things.
So whenever we realize that fear is entering the picture, our alarm bells should go off. Instead of talking ourselves out of something, we should ask: Which feeling is stronger: the fear or the desire? The fear wants me to stay where I am. The desire wants me to find out what happens if I go.
For me, the answer is obvious. I’m scared about moving to Portugal, but I want the move more than I fear it. Maybe I will be scared right up until the moment we arrive. What matters is that I’m willing to do it anyway. The older I get, the more I think that “do it scared” is less of a motivational slogan and more of a practical instruction for how to live. Not every fear should be ignored, of course. Some fears are trying to protect us. But there are also fears that appear whenever we’re about to grow, change, begin something new, or step into a version of life we’ve never experienced before.
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