Thursday: Feel the fear and poo your pants anyway

Today is Face Your Fears Day. It should have been an easy challenge really, at least in terms of planning, though perhaps not so much in implementation. However, this morning I found myself truly stumped, and as the day progressed I remained just as clueless.

Checking the corresponding page on daysoftheyear.com, it gave the following suggestion:

‘Take a moment to consider what your life might be like if you conquered some of your greatest fears.’

Sage advice and very inspiring, yet still I couldn’t plot a single course of action; this really was hugely frustrating.

I think my problem is that, though far from being a tough, unflinching person, I’ve conquered numerous fears over the last decade or so. When I was a kid and teenager I thought I’d never get a job, study at university, move out, have a girlfriend, tell anyone about my writing, speak in front of an audience or even go to a club, all because I was so scared of life. Very silly, granted, but also incredibly incapacitating.

Nevertheless, at the age of eighteen I started working at Morrisons and began my History degree at Hull University; the following year I moved out and continued the student lifestyle of getting drunk and dancing like an idiot four nights a week. I’ve had relationships over the years and finally, in 2008, I began sharing my random fiction and poetry with an ever-growing audience, with a collection released in 2009 and many public readings and some press and radio interviews soon following. I’m even really good at killing spiders these days, which I admit is cruel but a boon for a lifetime arachnophobe; plus I can eat in public, having felt unnecessarily self-conscious as a youth.

So I spent hours scratching my head and kicking myself for drawing blank after blank. There was nothing feasible that sprung to mind, nothing short of doing some impromptu and highly lethal bungee jumping from the nearest block of flats. But then, when it looked as though I might have to give up and declare the day a write off, it hit me like a ton of Lego bricks: I have an intense fear of writer’s block.

I’m currently 60,000 words (most likely 60%) into a novel and have been for almost six months. This scares the hell out of me, yet I know that I’ll finish it because it’s extremely important to me. I even get annoyed when I can’t think of a Twitter post, yet I never allow my feed to go without an update for more than 24 hours. So the threat of failing this project simply because I couldn’t think of what to write was the push I needed to face that very fear. Nearing the end of today's post, I am now relieved and delighted; and I hope that you, whoever you may be, managed to overcome a fear too.

So, shall I go clubbing or just eat something in public? Decisions, decisions.

Check out #faceyourfearsday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking the occasion. (Most probably with shrieks and screams.)

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The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That, and flying Nazi robots.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (adapted by Richard Sutherland)