Do Scary Things

A writer is a storyteller, a historian, a writer is anything really. A writer is a strange thing to be. The fact is old as language itself, older than documented history.
While I was puttering around online the other night, a writer I respect and admire said something ( in reality, a great many somethings) in a blog post that struck a chord in me, a note that hasn't been played in years. One line stuck with me, and struck me;
“do scary things.”
Do scary things?
I laughed a bit when I read it because he was, is, right. Those words extend so deeply into life, beyond writing.
When I was 16, I gave blood for the first time. Not solely for the sake that I am A-, a harder to find blood type, but much to the alarm of my creative writing teacher (and my mother), so I could understand what it feels like to lose that much blood.
The look on my teacher's face when I told him was both amused and concerned. Mom was mostly concerned.
I've been a blood donor ever since, whenever I can.
Scary things are everywhere in life. It took a lot of guts for me to get up on stage the first Open
Mic Night I read at. It took guts and perhaps 3 hours of getting ready at home, because if I was going to be scared, I was going to look good doing it. I was writing a character that did a lot of speaking on stage. I needed to feel that, to do it. So I did.
That was almost two years ago now… it's a strange thought.
I am the kind of person that sees everything as a scary thing, ESPECIALLY people. People are terrifying to me. I'm not entirely an introvert, not by any means an extrovert… I'm some blighted thing in the middle. I believe it might be an actor.
I am scared a majority of the time,too scared to leave my comfort zone, to do the scary things.
Life is all the scary things, and you have to do the scary things.
Every word out of my mouth is a scary thing to me, every set of eyes, every step into the light, every second on the stage, scary.
Parking? Okay, that's only kind of  scary. Walking in, saying hello, seeing the familiar faces, new faces, signing up, sitting down, scary.
I am always scared and maybe that's not the normal for most but that is normal to me.
Mess up a line onstage?
FUCK
Sheer. Terror.
Lose my place, lose my nerve, lose the steam for a piece in the middle of a reading?
FUCK
TERRIFYING.
Every beat of my heart is a shock, every breath in my lungs is a tornado, every step I take is pain.
I am always scared, even at work. Late night, rough customers, angry voices, damage control, long waits, tempers flaring, voices rising…
The catch of it all is a twisted thing; fear is good to me.
I lived with solid, abject fear for two years… fear that mom would see the awful things my boyfriend said to me in text, fear that she'd find his nasty letters, that she would see a bruise, that she would find the concealers, the cover ups, that I had begged and borrowed from girls in the locker room. Fear when I got to school that he would find me before I found my friends at breakfast, fear that he would take me to the visiting bleachers, fear that his hands would be harsh…
Fear becoming fact when people kept walking when I was screaming.
Fear being fact… when people saw it happen and then looked away.
You've gotta do scary things. Scary things like throwing the first punch to protect yourself after a year of taking it.
Scary things like giving in to the red anger for the first time and not knowing what happened for a whole half hour of your life.
Scary things like saying no, breaking up for the first time.
You have to do scary things in life, like let yourself be known.
My writing is my soul, beauty I cannot see in myself but that I feel. I am blind to myself.
Anybody who has let me rehearse my readings to them, who has given me feedback on what I have written and not yet read onstage has given that feeling in my soul something that I can see with my eyes. That something is beyond fear, beyond the scared young writer I started out as.
Everybody who has nurtured that dream… has a piece of my heart. That same thing that sends shocks through my chest, that same thing that serves as the molten core of a Phoenix… the very thing I lie and lie and lie to myself about in an attempt to guard against pain.
You have to do scary things to live.
I never wanted to drive on an icy road, I did. I almost died. Part of me did die.
Part of me, in the scream of metal and glass, expired. Part of me died and I, as I am before you, was born.
I did not want to open my eyes after the impact… but you have to do scary things.
I did not want to try to move my hands for fear they would be still, for fear that I would never again write, but I did and I do.
Scary things… if you don't do them, they will happen. Before this the only scary thing had been tame, controlled, the blood donation.
I do the scary things now. I don't let them happen, I make them happen.
Do scary things.
Perhaps the greatest words of inspiration at this stage of my life.