This weekend my boyfriend and I decided to watch “Finding Dory” from Pixar (he didn’t fall asleep so we were off to a good start) and in the middle of the movie, I remembered I got this “aha moment” We love to mention on this page where I told him “You know.. Dory is a badass, she is so stubborn and determined to get what she wants and she is not afraid of anything” After the scene where Nemo and Marlin finally reunite with her and they were wondering what would she do to get out of the challenge they were facing before. I remember I also said after a few minutes “Oh.. I know why she’s not afraid of anything and I think it is because she doesn’t have a long-term memory” and that stuck in my head the following days. Not only did I tell him this, but I also said I wanted to have a bestie like Dory who doesn’t let anything get in her way because I probably don’t consider myself capable of doing that. For me, that is the very core of the problem (and the solution at the same time). I’m constantly afraid of the countless ways things could go wrong, and I find myself getting very creative in dealing with them. It’s exhausting.
Sometimes, well actually most of the time, I have this self-defense mechanism where let’s say I have an important trip or birthday coming up then I won’t let myself get excited over it until the very same day it’s happening. That was my mindset during the whole time planning my trip to study in Paris. I had this long long list of items and things I had to do and I always told myself “I’ll get excited when I get my visa”… the visa came, still not excited. I was happy to be able to come, but I did this to protect myself from disapointment in case things didn’t work out of pure fear. On September the 15th when the plane finally took off I remember I breathed a sigh of relief and thought “I am going to Paris”.
Talking recently to my mom about it, I told her how I felt this frustration of being constantly so fearful that things wouldn’t work out that I couldn’t even get excited. My wish was to be more like her who was the complete opposite because she always believed from a place of faith and not fear. I don’t remember now the exact words she told me but I understood her message clearly. I thought that believing with faith that things were going to work out was the opposite of believing in nothing, when actually if you are not using your energy to believe that things are gonna work out is because this energy is being directed to the belief that the worst scenario is the one that is going to take place in your life. Both ways, you are believing something. This means, if there is this energy going to be released into possible future scenarios as a product of our incapability of remaining truly present, we could as well direct it with faith as our driver.
Thanks to one of those synchronicities that constantly swim around my life, 3 days ago I started a gratitude challenge that my aunt sent me where one of the first things they explained was that there are only two main energies in this world love and fear and if you are no vibrating in one you are vibrating in the other one. This stuff resonated with me because at this point I don’t know if I’m really such a scared person or if I just consider myself to be one, but when I reflect on my self-image I often perceive myself as such a scaredy-cat.
This is something I’ve been meaning to change for a while and I do know that this feeling of fear (that from my short knowledge of medicine comes from our amygdala when it senses threat) has one sole purpose and it’s to protect us from it. Fear is protecting us from dangerous situations based on our knowledge from the past of the ways we got hurt by it. Now, going back to my Finding Dory reference, I don’t think the solution to this problem is suffering from Short-term memory loss, but to understand that when the moment comes when we recognize this feeling called fear, we shut up the old versions of ourselves who tell us how it is going to end up based on past experiences.
And hold up, I’m not saying if you are walking alone in the middle of the night and feel fear because your life may be threatened you should continue. I mean all of those situations where we have to do things that scare us but have the potential of being great accomplishments in our lives and we’re just being scaredy-cats. We could take a moment, a deep breath with the intention of coming to the present and then decide that this is a whole new opportunity to create an experience without judging it based on past results.