Fear + desire = good

I guess we're doing math now.

Hello from my grandmother’s house in Tucson, where the sun shines as if clouds never existed. The desert is blooming, the birds are rioting, and I want to sleep for ten years.

This is the first time in the weekly posting journey that I don’t have a plan for what to write. It’s Wednesday night, I’m exhausted, and seemingly out of creative juice.

No one forces me to spend my free time writing. I’m often asked how I balance projects alongside a legal career and the answer is, because I want to. It’s not so different from the person who wakes up early to go to the climbing gym or someone who spends his lunch hour on a run. Not to be an optimizer but, if I have time to check TikTok, I have time to write.

I do it from a place of desire. It feeds me and fuels me—indeed, as I’ve begun writing this tonight, I feel less tired than when I began. I need to trust that, if I didn’t want to send a newsletter out this week, I wouldn’t. I would feel comfortable honoring my needs at the expense of a public promise.

I want to write this newsletter. What’s holding me back is fear—a concern that it won’t be good enough or that I don’t have anything to say. That it’ll be embarrassing, irrelevant, foolish, or whatever else my critics would tell me if I was worthy of their hate.

When fear stands in the way of desire, it’s not the kind of fear we should heed. I first heard this concept listening to an interview with Martha Beck, an expert in teaching self-trust. In response to a question about how to listen to your gut, she differentiated between two types of fear. One is fear paired with something we don’t want to do: i.e., I don’t want to enter that train car because I’m afraid that I won’t feel safe. This is the fear we should heed.

On the flip side, there’s fear that is coupled with desire—I want to go skydiving but I’m afraid of the obvious risks. Martha says we should push through those fears that stand in the way of desire. Go skydiving if you want to! Don’t let fear rule the day.

In that spirit, I’m sharing a shockingly simple visualization of this concept, courtesy of my retired nurse practitioner grandmother’s notepad:

I suppose you should also do the things you desire and don’t fear, but that box seems obvious.

So why do I write? Because I want to. I have things to say and visions of how to say them, and to get there I need to put in work. The more used to it I get, the less I notice the fear. Like how once you’re comfortable walking on ridges, you see the sturdy steps and not the drops on either side.

I’ve heard this concept described as risk tolerance, at least in the hiking realm. But I prefer to orient around desire. Is this something I want to do? If so, it’s worth doing.

Martha Beck will explain this next part a lot better than I can. But the more we listen to and follow our instinctive desires, the more attuned we’ll get to those fears we should heed. The fear that keeps us from doing what we don’t want to do.

We likely already know what we want. It only gets confusing when we judge those desires or refuse to acknowledge them. When our brains get in the way.

Writing puts me in a flow state the same as most exercise does, and especially this kind of writing without contours or requirements. It’s the ultimate freedom.

I gave myself a challenge seven weeks ago in part because I was languishing. Even though I wanted to write, I wasn’t. I was stewing and stressing and feeling guilty about not having moved projects along. So I thought perhaps an eight-week plan would give me a place to start.

I’m shocked by how well it’s worked. In the past seven weeks, I’ve added 25,000 words to my long-form fiction project. That’s in addition to these weekly entries, and in addition to writing two legal briefs and giving two oral arguments. Oh, and I’ve watched friends move to Canada and people be detained and disappeared without due process and federal funding evaporate for all but the military, it seems.

I guess that’s why I’m tired. But I also know that making this eight-week commitment worked. It was well worth overcoming the fear to do it.

Perhaps my fears aren’t apparent to you as a reader. We often can’t tell what other people experience, which is yet another reason not to cow to perceived societal pressures.

But I’ll tell you, it was scary to start a newsletter. It was (is) scary to send each letter. It was scary to commit to writing for eight weeks straight, and it’s deeply scary to be writing a fiction project in the hopes that it will eventually be read.

These are fears worth confronting, because these are fears that stand in the way of what I want.

I’m trying to think about my at-times cringey writing as akin to a friend discovering a bright green velour bucket hat at a thrift shop. He puts it on and suddenly it’s his whole personality. He loves it. It completes something in him.

I may not understand his love for this hat or agree that the hat’s any good. I may not connect the dots to some deep-buried desire he has to be the guy wearing that hat. But if he’s my friend, I’ll support him, alongside some good-natured teasing. Who knows? I might just end up loving it too.

This Palo Verde screams desire, regardless of what your seasonal allergies say.

I am very tempted to end this with a Dune reference… okay, might as well. Because in the Martha Beck framework, fear that stands in the way of desire is the mind-killer.

The Bene Gesserit know.

Welp, not sure how we ended up here, but at least there’s a nice full circle moment with the desert references. Happy birthday Mom! Happy May Day everyone! Wishing you as pleasant of a Thursday as can be.