All anxiety is recycled fear

Who’s afraid of the big bad what

Want to hear something weird? You aren’t afraid of what’s coming, you’re afraid of what’s happened.

Bear with me as this is a working theory.

The story told about fear is that it’s a natural reaction to the unknown. Not controlling what happens next makes you vulnerable and being vulnerable is risky. In that vulnerability, you find your fear.

This makes an abstract sense.

But there’s something else I think is at play. If we don’t know what’s coming, how is it that we fear it? The truth is we don’t.

What we’re afraid of is the pain and suffering we’ve seen before. Each experience with loss leaves an emotional boundary on us that we unconsciously guard. We touch this boundary to get a jolt of fear as a way to protect us from reliving known pain.

Consider death, our one shared certainty. There is no way to truly know what’s on the other side of dying. It could be awesome, or nothing, or bad, or something that living humans can’t even comprehend. Are we afraid of everything death could be or are we scared by the shape of previous encounters we’ve had with loss, grief, and vulnerability?

Before we knew pain, we were unafraid.

Children walk to the edge of cliffs, pet strange dogs, and strike up conversations with strangers. Their world is unfiltered, unbound by the complex emotional landscapes we construct as adults. What changes? We accumulate experiences that teach us to be cautious, to be afraid.

This is necessary! People tend to survive a lot longer if they learn about dangers.

But in our hyper-connected world, we’re learning about every possible danger. Not just those that could help us navigate our lives more carefully and confidently.

Social media, news cycles, even LinkedIn are 24/7 fear factories. We consume other people's traumas, and our brains absorb these stories as if they were our own. The line between personal experience and borrowed fear blurs increasingly.

When I find myself afraid of the future, I have to ask myself, ‘Whose story am I fearing?’ Fear is a shadow of the past. But shadows can’t hurt you.

You don’t know what’s coming but you know what’s been.

YOU HAVE BEEN .. AND YOU STILL ARE.

You have survived everything that has happened to you so far. Every challenge, every moment of pain, every unexpected twist—you've made it through. Those experiences have not destroyed you; they have fallen behind you as you continue forward. Maybe they even opened a new path for you. Draw on those experiences as a sign of your resilience more than a list of things to fear in the future.

You’re here in all your strength and glory.

Do not be afraid.

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