Fear of Success

“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars.

You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.”

- C.S. Lewis -

We all know about fear of failure - we don't do things sometimes, because the consequences if we failed would then be worse than the consequences if we did not try at all. Makes sense.

But no one ever talks about fear of success. Because the truth is that we can fear this more even than failing. Illness provides us with a place of safety and an excuse for failure. If we don't live up to our full potential then we can blame it on our illness, which robbed our lives from us. Recovery means taking responsibility for our own lives, our failures and shortcomings as well as our attributes. What if that is just too much to bear? It is worse to fail when we are being our authentic selves, because it pierces our very being, threatens the person we think we are, our sense of self. And discovering that our image of ourselves is flawed threatens everything - nothing is constant anymore, how can we be sure of other people, of the world, when we cannot be sure that our interpretation of our selves is correct?

A little success also leads to the expectation of greater success, making it all the more disappointing when we inevitably slip up at some point in the process. So we might think "Why take the risk?"

Yet we must. Because whilst it may be difficult to do that thing which you fear, you come through it with a little less fear, a little more belief in yourself and closer to your goal. If we avoid the thing that scares us, then the fear takes over, eats us up, gets stronger and becomes that much more difficult to face the next time. When we do this repeatedly, our lives become wrapped up in a bundle of avoidance of those things we fear, rather than being focused on what it should: building a life around the things we love and the things we want to achieve. And that is not not living, merely getting by.

So do you want to get by? Or do you want to LIVE?