Fear and Courage

I’ve been told this week that I have great courage.

It’s funny but I don’t always see it that way. Sometimes you have to face the lesser of two fears. Is that courage? I’m not sure.

I was scared to leave my marriage and what it would mean for all four of us in the family. But at the same time, I was scared that by staying in a marriage that wasn’t working, I would waste this one incredible life that I’ve been given. That I would miss out on all the things that I want to do, see, be a part of. It took many years for one fear to become greater than the other in my life and eventually win out.

It was scarier for me to think of myself at 50 or 60 or 70 having a list of regrets of things that I never did than it was to leave my husband. So I screwed up my courage and told him that I was leaving. It was years in the coming. And years in the telling but the day that it finally happened was one of the scariest of my life. And yet I felt strangely exhilarated too. I finally had faced my fear.

There is never a good day to break up a marriage and break up a family. There’s never going to be a day where you wake up and think, ‘oh I know, today would be a good day to end my marriage’. If you wait for that day, you will wait a looooooong time or maybe forever.

But there is a day where you can wake up and think, ‘oh I know, today would be a good day to believe in myself. To make sure that I live the life that I want. To live with no regrets.’

And so, I’ve faced a lot of fears in the past eighteen months. And I’ve learned the more that you turn and face your fears, instead of trying to outrun them, the more they lose their power over you.

So now, when I’m scared, I take a deep breath and do what’s needed. If I’m true to myself and to my heart, then I don’t necessarily think it’s courage. It’s accepting that moment for what it is. And being with the flow of Life rather than fighting it.