My best friend is an ex military guy, and one of his favorite phrases is “embrace the suck”. That started going through my head repeatedly while I was getting ready for and driving to work. That seemed to cause the mental turmoil caused by exposing a deeper fear to abate a bit. This may suck right now, but I need to get these things that are buried in my subconscious taken care of if I want to get anywhere in life, if some mental discomfort is the price I have to pay for that, so be it. Suck embraced.
Then my subconscious started giving information again. It started with another phrase “I need to be a hero because I’ve been a coward”. That started playing on repeat along with “embrace the suck”. That lead quickly to me thinking about why I chose the career I wanted, and why I am so attached to getting there. It’s a physically dangerous job, but one that forces you to face fear and perform while scared. That’s something that I felt I needed, and now I know why.
I was a fearful kid. I don’t know when it started, and I don’t know why, but by the time I was a teenager I chickened out on a lot of things, from sports to fights that I should have been in, to social stuff. Heck, I was almost completely unable to talk to girls I was attracted to. There was just paralyzing fear in a lot of situations. This caused me to have a lot of shame growing up.
Around the end of high school, I got through some of it. I won a few fights, I had some success with girls. But that sense of being a coward deep down persisted. Since then I’ve been trying to do things to prove to myself that I’m not that.
Of course, this didn’t just come to me in words, my subconscious treated me to a multimedia slide show of all the times I’ve let fear defeat me (maybe not all, but good highlight reel, not fun).
It also showed me a kind of diagram. It was it told me how fear works in the subconscious. (This is hard to describe) it looked like an octopus or a plant buried in the bedrock of the mind. There were all kinds of tendrils coming off a central node that had four pieces (don’t know if that’s important). They went up a level, and they each of them formed a node with a bunch of tendrils that went up another level until the surface which was crawling with tentacle/tendril tips that can week havoc.
What I was doing, was ripping apart a very large node several levels down that contained the fears that I just described. Kinda cool as well as being brutal. It explains why I feel like I’m pushing a rock in my head, and why it feels like somebody took an eggbeater to my brain.
Then my subconscious started giving information again. It started with another phrase “I need to be a hero because I’ve been a coward”. That started playing on repeat along with “embrace the suck”. That lead quickly to me thinking about why I chose the career I wanted, and why I am so attached to getting there. It’s a physically dangerous job, but one that forces you to face fear and perform while scared. That’s something that I felt I needed, and now I know why.
I was a fearful kid. I don’t know when it started, and I don’t know why, but by the time I was a teenager I chickened out on a lot of things, from sports to fights that I should have been in, to social stuff. Heck, I was almost completely unable to talk to girls I was attracted to. There was just paralyzing fear in a lot of situations. This caused me to have a lot of shame growing up.
Around the end of high school, I got through some of it. I won a few fights, I had some success with girls. But that sense of being a coward deep down persisted. Since then I’ve been trying to do things to prove to myself that I’m not that.
Of course, this didn’t just come to me in words, my subconscious treated me to a multimedia slide show of all the times I’ve let fear defeat me (maybe not all, but good highlight reel, not fun).
It also showed me a kind of diagram. It was it told me how fear works in the subconscious. (This is hard to describe) it looked like an octopus or a plant buried in the bedrock of the mind. There were all kinds of tendrils coming off a central node that had four pieces (don’t know if that’s important). They went up a level, and they each of them formed a node with a bunch of tendrils that went up another level until the surface which was crawling with tentacle/tendril tips that can week havoc.
What I was doing, was ripping apart a very large node several levels down that contained the fears that I just described. Kinda cool as well as being brutal. It explains why I feel like I’m pushing a rock in my head, and why it feels like somebody took an eggbeater to my brain.
