Fear handicaps. It takes hold of you and squeezes until you cannot
breathe nor move. Fear kills. Lately I
have been very afraid and that fear almost killed my happiness and my
effectiveness as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I am not afraid of meeting people nor
am I afraid of Spanish. I speak the language recklessly. Spewing poorly
conjugated verbs and made up Spanglish nouns. I do this without shame like a
toddler learning to walk. I fall all over the place gleefully ready to learn. The
fear of failure is my monster. It haunts
my dreams as well as my mornings. A huge
part of it is ego. I want to be the best Peace Corps Volunteer ever. I think my
group is the best Peace Corps group ever!
That ego combined with a huge need to be helpful makes the prospect of
disappointing my community too much to bear at times. My father refers to this the trap of being
awesome. There have been times when my want to leave my community in awe of my
ability to be witty, giving, and creative has superseded my want to simply
experience. It is at these times that my lack of wit, my rigidness creatively,
and my inability to give or do anything hurts the most. My first 3 months here
in my community are about me learning about the place and people that I live
with. I sit for hours in a school and
watch. I cannot teach right now. I cannot start any projects. I want to pasear (visit and talk)
to 11 houses a day yet the heat, which at times reaches 100 degrees, prevents that. I can only experience. Sometimes I fail even at that. It can be tedious and hot and there is no place to show or do. That ego and that fear of failure trapped me for many days. I couldn’t get out of bed and racked my brain how everybody would see me as fraud. All the Peace Corps Volunteers that I admire would be disappointed, as would my community. It got so bad that the thing that I was afraid of most, failing my community, I began to do. I shrunk away from the people in my community and ran to things that would give me comfort from the Monster of failure. For me, it was the easy access to Internet. For others it is food, or love, or liquor, or shopping. Whatever it is that we use to deter us from the things we are afraid of only prolongs that pain. Instead of looking at that monster we run and run creating a cycle. I was afraid of failure. So afraid that I began to fail which would make me feel worse and want to sooth the pain of it.
to 11 houses a day yet the heat, which at times reaches 100 degrees, prevents that. I can only experience. Sometimes I fail even at that. It can be tedious and hot and there is no place to show or do. That ego and that fear of failure trapped me for many days. I couldn’t get out of bed and racked my brain how everybody would see me as fraud. All the Peace Corps Volunteers that I admire would be disappointed, as would my community. It got so bad that the thing that I was afraid of most, failing my community, I began to do. I shrunk away from the people in my community and ran to things that would give me comfort from the Monster of failure. For me, it was the easy access to Internet. For others it is food, or love, or liquor, or shopping. Whatever it is that we use to deter us from the things we are afraid of only prolongs that pain. Instead of looking at that monster we run and run creating a cycle. I was afraid of failure. So afraid that I began to fail which would make me feel worse and want to sooth the pain of it.
I believe
in the power of meditation and self-actualization. A leader in meditation Pema Chordron
speaks at length about the power of fear in our lives. She has a book “The
Places that scare you: A guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times “, and
reading it helped me allot. I knew that
the only way to conquer this monster was to first look at it. Looking at it was
painful. No one wants to see himself or herself as egotistical or needy. No one
wants to see that they have actually not been mindful. However it is the only
way to get over it. I looked at myself
and decided I had to change the pattern that I was in or I would stay
emotionally stuck and would not have an effective or happy Peace Corps Service.
I gave myself very small goals in order to battle my fear. Here are the goals I made for myself:
Get out of Bed
DO NOT use
the computer in the morning
Leave the
House
Go to
School
Visit 2
houses
Finding peace |
No comments:
Post a Comment