Rachel Pettiford: The Art of Being Afraid
I want to talk about the things that keep me up at night
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels
This week, my friend Rachel is hosting Sunday brunch. I’m happy to add a new addition to the conversation, and I’m glad she was kind enough to share this piece. Happy Sunday! 🌞
The world is a scary place. I’m afraid of a lot of things. Some of my biggest fears are physical things, like spiders. I’m afraid to get robbed. I’m afraid of heights, sort of. I can’t swim and I’m afraid to find an allergic reaction to food that I love. All of these are just minuscule things. Everyone has fears like these, but I think the most dangerous fears are the fears that we don’t say out loud. I’m going to get real personal here, because once we acknowledge things that we are afraid of, we take the first step in overcoming them, and once we overcome them can we grow and be better people because of it.
I guess in a typical sense, you can call me a scaredy-cat. If you talk to any of my friends, they could probably name three things that I am deathly afraid of. However, I want to talk about the things that keep me up at night staring at the wall paralyzed in fear because these are things that are out of my control.
I am afraid of failure. I am afraid of embarrassment. I am afraid of putting myself in a position where I am taking an L, which happens a lot, but normally in private. I’m afraid of taking this L in a very public manner, and being a joke, to put it frankly. I am so afraid of this that I have missed opportunities that could have put me miles ahead of where I am currently. I attribute some of this to how I grew up, where I grew up, and who I grew up with.
Growing up, I was nothing more than the black girl in every group. I was always the token. I was not a black girl but the black girl. The only black girl in all of my various clubs, organizations, and friend groups. Though I tried my best to be the best, nothing much was expected of me. Actually, in eighth grade after the talk in gym class, my friends and I were joking around. We were talking about which one of us was going to lose our virginity first. And of course, everyone was like “ew sex is gross,” but everyone just assumed it would be me. As a preacher’s kid, I didn’t understand the rationale behind this. So when I asked for clarification, no one had an answer for me it just made sense that I would be the one to lose my virginity. I mean, okay. Then freshman year, one of my friends got pregnant. and everyone of course was like, “oh my goodness this is tea!” and of course the conversation would go, “well who’s going to have a baby first out of us,” and of course it was me again. At this point, I wasn’t sure where this was coming from as I hadn’t even had my first kiss yet and I don’t think that I even held a boys hand at this point. So I asked - why do you think I’ll have a baby first and they just looked at me and said we don’t know it just makes sense. Not that it matters, but I was the last to lose my virginity and I don’t have any kids. But this micro-aggressive behavior kind of instilled the fear in me that I will be nothing more than the small-town black girl who has babies and doesn’t do anything else.
When it came to conversations like who is going to be the next president of drama club or maybe next senior class president, no one ever put me in those conversations. These are things that I wanted but never achieved, and that’s okay, but the problem is that no one ever saw me in roles of power or influence. They only saw me in regular roles. No one ever encouraged me to apply for executive board positions or scholarships or internships, but I was constantly encouraged to think small, do something weird or funny. I was always volunteered to be a caricature or blueprint to anything that was the accent or background. I think because I felt like people didn’t believe in me enough to be in these roles of influence, this feeling of inadequacy manifested itself in me. So I feel like I’ll never be able to achieve these things. I consider myself pretty ambitious but I’m so afraid of falling short again that I just won’t do it. It’s to the point that I’ve seen people become pretty successful with ideas that I shared with them at the dinner table or maybe in a drunk night at the bar and the difference is they dared to do these things and I didn’t. That’s not okay for a multitude of reasons but the biggest one is I clearly have the tools to do these things and yet fear has stood in my way every time.
I’m also afraid of being alone. This runs a lot deeper than being physically alone in a place. I’m afraid of living alone. I’m afraid of celebrating things alone. I’m afraid of waking up one day and being 70 years old and looking back and seeing that I’ve lived my life alone. Truly, I’m afraid of accomplishing big things and making it to the top just to turn around and see that I’m on this mountain top alone. This fear manifests itself in many relationships that I have and many relationships I no longer have. It’s led me to do some crazy things, some things I regret, some things I don’t regret but still wish I hadn’t done. It’s gotten me into situations that I wish I knew then what I know now. If I was in a position to overcome this fear easily, I think I’d save myself a lot of heartbreak, a lot of tears, and a lot of broken relationships. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone. Maybe this is the hair of the dog that bit my ass.
I share these things with you because, at first glance, you probably wouldn’t guess these things. It’s a known fact that I am deathly afraid of spiders and I will kill myself and anyone around me to get away from them. But I’m social and I enjoy being around people and I enjoy laughing and being with my friends. So it’s really easy to say to me “wow Rae, you’re in grad school, you’re accomplishing a lot” or “wow Rae, you have so many friends, how could you ever feel alone.” It’s pretty easy actually. What I’m coming to realize is that I can’t continue to let these fears eat at me and keep me up at night when I only have so much time on this planet before I am returned to a beautiful oblivion. In the time of civil unrest and COVID-19, we’ve had a lot of time to consider who we are as people. This time is unique because we are all stuck in the house and we don’t have a lot going on. This gives us additional time to kind of regroup and see where we are as individuals.
Over the last six or seven months, I’ve grown more than I have in the past year and I think it has to do with how you train your mind to process new information. In the preface of Learning everywhere on campus: Teaching strategies for student affairs professionals, the authors offer this sentiment. “[The thing about] learning is that it is a process that occurs when people have new experiences, reflect on the experiences, and derive some verbal description of the meaning, value, and possibly skills associated with those experiences.” (Fried and Harper, 2018). Though this was written for the student affairs profession, it is still applicable to everyday life. We grow and develop every day. People often believe that once you’ve learned something, that’s it and move on to the next, but that’s simply not true. As you grow and develop, you continue learning and building upon what you’ve experienced every day.
So yeah, we all have fears and these fears may be surface-level...or they may be something much deeper. But to overcome them, you have to say them out loud. You have to make them real, and then grow and learn from them. As you’re presented with new experiences every day, you are presented with new opportunities to grow. Make the most of them. Reflect, build upon them, and learn something every day.
If you enjoyed this week’s post, let Rachel know in the comments below. And if you’re interested in hosting Sunday Brunch, reach out! Let’s add more voices to our weekly conversation.