How to Live Fearlessly

I am afraid. Of pretty much everything. I'm afraid of spiders and heights and the dark, I'm afraid of driving and horror movies and vulnerability and yes, food. I'm afraid of the future and the unknown and what my life might turn out to be.

Where that leaves me is caught in a strange kind of limbo between wanting to be involved and wanting to live life to the fullest and wanting to crawl up in a hole and escape the world.

I want to live life fearlessly. I want to put my arms out to the stars and collect what their dust brings. I want to collect infinities and become them. I want to live a life full of surprises and spontaneity, without overthinking, without calculations, without harsh lines and edges. I want to glide through and keep my head face-forward without pausing to look behind me lest something strange follow. I want to make friends with the monster under my bed and shake the hand of the black mass in my closet that haunts me at night.

I am afraid that when I come to die, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, I will "discover that I have not lived."

In order to move towards the fearless, vulnerable, spontaneous life I wish to live, I must make a few commitments.

• Challenging My Thoughts
• Especially the eating disordered ones. I hold a lot of fear in my attitude towards food. I hold a lot of tension in that relationship, a lot of strain on myself and my mind. If I continue to engage with my eating disorder, I limit the things which I can engage in outside of it. I constrain my life because of my fear. I don't need to live my life on a calorie calculating app, afraid the number will be higher than yesterday's.

• Radical Acceptance
• There are some things I can change and some things I can't. Learning to accept the things I can't for what they are will lessen anxiety--I tend to get frustrated and nervous when I don't see results, but if what I don't see results in is unchangeable...you get where I'm going.

• Putting Myself Out of My Comfort Zone
• My comfort zone is not where magical things happen. I have never experienced fulfillment by doing things that don't freak me out at least a little; the more I do said things, the less freaked out by them I am, the more I can challenge myself to do. Fulfillment is the direct opposite of anxiety: I want to feel warm and happy. I want to feel fulfilled.

• Moving One Step at a Time
• I don't need to do all the things at once. I don't need to do all the things at once. I do not need to do all the things at once. Breaking things down to parts and pieces not only makes my long-term goals more attainable but also gives me more things to work toward. And wow, do I love crossing things off a To-Do List.

• Not Berating Myself For My Mistakes
• It's okay. Breathe. You are not a failure, you are not a human disaster, your life is not over. When you try really hard to live the life you've always imagined, some things are bound to go wrong. It's not always your fault, and it's never because you aren't good enough.

• Living Authentically
• I can't waste any more time living the life of a person I'm not. Period. I can't live my life fearlessly if I'm unable to do what I truly love in fear that someone will discover the real me. The real me is enough. The real me always has been.

What could I become, were I not afraid?