I'm afraid of being afraid, and I'm afraid that I'm afraid to admit it.

By Dramstudio (Stable Diffusion)

I’m afraid of being afraid, and I’m afraid that I’m afraid to admit it.

Not exactly. But close.

I’m sitting here typing this right now. (And editing it right now.) I don’t feel afraid. But I predict that I won’t post it, and I’m afraid that might be due to being afraid.

I edit what I write, sometimes to death or the closest thing to it. I’ve got 60 unpublished drafts since I moved to Substack and many more in Blogger. The living dead.

That sounds like perfectionism, and Elizabeth Gilbert says perfectionism is nothing but fear dressed up in fancy clothes. (That’s not exactly what Elizabeth Gilbert says, and I actually looked it up--perfectionist that I am--and then paraphrased what she said to show that I was not afraid to include that imperfection.)

“Moron,” said an imaginary voice in my head.

I ignored it.

“No, you didn’t,” the voice pointed out.

I tend to procrastinate. John, one of my SBMs, once told me that procrastination was due to fear, and he was probably right.

Fear of what?

Dead President Franklin Roosevelt is said to have said, when alive, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” That might be true.¹

I remembered an [old blog post I’d written titled “Love and Fear,” but I didn’t remember what the post said—something about love and fear being the only choices.

“I’m not an old blog post,” I imagined the blog post interjecting. “I’m timeless.”

“And the post is titled ‘Love or Fear,’” said my inner perfectionist after it insisted on returning and checking the title.

“Whatever,” I retconned saying, and retconned reading the blog post, which I had read yesterday when I was writing my first attempt at this one.

I had forgotten almost everything in the post except for the title.

“And technically, you’d even forgotten that,” said my inner perfectionist.

I reread the post.

“I read it too,” said an imaginary reader. Maybe even a real one after I publish this. “It’s pretty effing good.”

“You mean pretty fucking good,” said another imaginary reader from New York. “Don’t be a pussy. Say what you mean.”

“You don’t realize how brilliant you are,” God said. And that was the title of the next blog post that I started to write yesterday and will be the title when I finish writing it, maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Love or Fear are the choices, and I choose to love and Publish.

You can also continue and read the footnote. Or the blog post.

1. I was tempted to say that Roosevelt should have said, “There is nothing to fear but metafear,” but technically, that’s incorrect. Metafear is fear of fear and not fear itself. Fear itself, I suppose, is self-referential fear.