Thread by @rebelrealcanon

The thing about fear is it will never just go away on its own. You have to be proactive about getting rid of it--and actively nurturing it is the worst possible thing you can do for yourself.

But if you think you're just going to wait it out until it goes away...it won't happen.

Since I ought to be meeting my coworkers for the first time right now but am not, I feel like it's a good time to retell my story about when I decided never to let fear make decisions for me.

I was about 8 yrs old and had gone out with the girls across the street and their dad.

He decided to take us walking across the local frozen lake. Then he decided to start clowning around and jumping on the ice. He fell in and RAN home, leaving the three of us, all under 10, standing on the ice staring at the hole he'd left. The two girls were hysterical.

They skittered for the shore at the nearest point to where we were...which meant practically touching the hole. I thought this was stupid but they yelled and yelled at me to get off the ice. I'd seen plenty of movies where people died like this, but I still felt it was dumb...

...going over untested ice close to a hole that had spontaneously opened up, just to get to the shore, seemed a lot less safe to me than just retracing my steps across the ice that had safely held all four of us on the way out. So I turned around & walked back the way we'd come.

I was certainly frightened the entire time, especially with my friends crying and yelling at me the entire way. But I got home safely. I knew from then that fear is dishonest. It can be informative, but it can also deceive. You've got to think. Don't just be controlled by emotion

Fear is the most familiar emotion to me. I've been terrified by something or other almost every waking minute for at least decades, plural. But I didn't, and couldn't, just hide in bed waiting for that feeling to evaporate, because it never would. I just had to deal with it.

It's funny how everybody 18 months ago was laughing about "we are all Monk now!" Except Monk didn't hide in his house. Monk is one of the bravest characters ever, because he does more things in the face of more fears than most ever people do in the face of any fear.

Politicians love the idea of us being one of those sad chicken farms where the birds are paralyzed in cages and fed through tubes and do nothing but produce for the farmer's benefit. That's their paradise, their dream nation.

It's not mine. For God's sake... stop this madness.