Dreadless: Success

If you are new to this blog series, please begin here: Dreadless: An Introduction.

Daylight is growing around me as two lanes transform into four and the evergreens of Snohomish County fade into a concrete jungle of buildings and noise barriers. On a freeway where a moment before I was cruising along with only the occasional semi-truck and early morning tourist for company, I’m suddenly surrounded by other cars. I grip the wheel of my Subaru with white knuckles and a growing sensation of pressure in my chest.

Easy, girl, I tell myself silently, as if I’m soothing a nervous horse. It’s ok. You’re doing great. Stay in your gates, and keep your spacing. 

I take a long, deep breath, then another one, and another. When the next song comes up, it distracts me from the pressure pounding in my chest. The long, epic intro to “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” by Pink Floyd is the perfect sound track for my embarkment into the concrete wilderness of the city. The haunting strains begin to relax me and my panic shifts to excitement.

I can’t believe I’m driving, alone, on the freeway in a big city. Less than a year before this, I never believed I would get my driver’s license. Even a few months before, I still didn’t believe I’d ever overcome my fear enough to drive on the freeway. But here I am.

All my adult life, I’d been terrified to drive. I’d tried over and over to learn, but over the years anxiety grew into panic attacks that made me a danger behind the wheel, and produced a phobia of driving. For me, this is what success looked like: Being able to drive myself on the freeway without putting myself (and others) in danger from my own fear. It took nearly twenty years from the time I was old enough to drive to this moment of success.

It may seem like an ordinary, nearly trivial thing to the millions of Americans who have been driving since they were teenagers. As well say that success to me is going grocery shopping, or taking the dog for a walk. But limited by my own fear as I had been for years, for most of my life driving on the freeway seemed as far away as driving on the moon or piloting a spaceship in another universe.

This scene, driving on the freeway in a large city and being able to calm myself down enough to do it well and safely, is the happy ending to my story.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to tell you the whole story of how I was able to overcome fear and learn how to drive. Why did I start at the end? Because a huge part of my journey through fear to success was learning to envision success.

If there’s something in life that is holding you back from being the person you want to be and living the life you want to live, telling the happy ending to your own story will go a long way toward getting you there.

From a storytelling perspective, this amounts to having an understanding of your character’s motivation. What does your character want so much that he or she is willing to risk everything to get it? In real life as well as fiction, you will get much better results if you can put that motivation into a concrete image or scene. If your character wants love, you don’t just say they want love. You show them yearning to be held in the arms of the one they love, or imagining coming home to a loving spouse.

You can do the same in your life. It’s easy to get hyper-focused on the obstacles, the things that are standing in the way of your achieving your goal. Set them aside for a moment. Think about what it would look like if those barriers were gone and you could walk straight to your goal and hold it in your hand, or hug it, or drive through it, or run through the tape at the end of the race, or ride the perfect wave . . .

When you focus on the obstacles, you give them power in your life. For years when I tried to sit down in the driver’s seat, all I could see was fear. But when I started to visualize success in a concrete fashion, I was able to diminish the power that the fear held over me. Even though it was still hard to actually believe I would be successful, I had a picture in my mind of what it would be like to live without being oppressed by fear.

If you are prevented from doing something you really want to do by interior obstacles, as I was, it’s probably because the story you hold inside is one of failure, rather than one of success. As I’m going to discuss further in the next couple of posts, very often the stories we tell about ourselves are outdated and harmful. Visualizing success is the first step in beginning to be able to re-tell the story of your life.

This is why I began the story of how I overcame my greatest fear at the end. Because that is really where this story begins: With a belief, however tiny, that it might be possible to succeed.

In the next post, Dreadless: The False Story, I’m going to tell you the story I believed about myself for most of my life.

In case you want to take something away from these posts other than just my story and some advice, here are a couple of activities you can use to apply the strategies I learned while overcoming my fear of driving. Please refer to the disclaimer in Dreadless: An Introduction.

Storytelling: Write the scene of what would happen if your character got what they really wanted. What would success look like, feel like, taste like, sound like to your character? Where does success take place for them? Who is there supporting and celebrating their successes?

Personal Growth: Sit or lie comfortably in a safe, quiet place and close your eyes. Take a few deep, relaxing breaths. Think specifically about the thing that you want to do that you are having trouble approaching, eg, driving, being social, flying on a plane, taking a class. If you start to feel anxious or panicked, take a few more breaths. Now imagine all of the emotional barriers are gone and you are doing the thing that you have been held back from. Where are you? What are you doing? What does your face look like? Who is there celebrating your success with you? What music is playing? Once you are done, write down as much as you can recall of your vision. Save it to refer to when the obstacles seem overwhelming.