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| Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway - American Author Susan Jeffers | Life Lessons Series |
Life Lesson #6
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
I was in the sixth grade the first time I felt fear. The kind of fear that stops your breath and makes your heart beat faster, the kind of fear that makes your palms sweat and your head feel like it's about to explode. A fear of an uncertain future where death lurks in every corner of your fragile mind. When I was eleven years old I experienced my first anxiety attack. I found a postcard in my backpack that read, “In five days you will be dead, I’m going to kill you,” a death threat by an unknown fellow student in my elementary school. My inability to process the anxiety I felt caused me to faint and I was found by my teacher lying on the floor, pale and paralyzed with fear.
Emergency Services were called along with my mother. After the paramedics arrived and checked my vitals, I heard them tell my teacher and my mother that I had a severe anxiety attack brought on by stress. After being released by the paramedics into my nurse mother’s care I went home. That night I couldn’t sleep, I woke up from several nightmares unable to catch my breath, my mother laid beside me unable to sleep waiting for the moment that my skin would start to sweat and I would jump out of my sleep. She soothed me with prayers, held me in her arms as I asked, “Mama who wants to kill me? I haven’t done anything to anybody I swear,” tears of fear and confusion streaming down my face.
I stayed in bed for two days refusing to go back to school when my mother came into my room, sat on my bed and handed me a book with an orange and yellow jacket. I remember her words to me, “Read this book today because tomorrow you go back to school.” I looked at her in dismay but took the book and read the cover, “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers.” That afternoon with much reluctance and curiosity I read the book that I had seen amongst my mother’s things for years but never bothered to pick up. Before the postcard I had considered myself a carefree and fearless little girl but the circumstances of life and possible death changed that. Once upon a time the unknown excited me but in that moment the unknown terrified me.
I can recall the quote in this powerful book published in 1987 that helped me find my courage again: “The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it.” The next day I woke up and made the decision to go back to school with three days left on the death threat’s clock. I sat in class feeling fear every minute of that day but I got through it, then I got through the next day and the next. I felt the fear every one of those three days; I felt the fear when I found a second postcard with an apology written on it in my backpack; I felt the fear when the school discovered where the threat originated from but I went to school during the worst week of my life, I sat in class, I hung out with my friends at recess, I was brave even in the face of my fears.
The incident in elementary school was the first anxiety attack I had ever had but I was not the last. Whenever I have felt fear in my life I remember those three days where a scared eleven year old faced death head-on and I remember Susan Jeffers book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway and I find the courage to be brave, to face life's challenges despite my fears because there will always be monsters in the closet, there will always be dragons to slay but guess what? You have to Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Thank you Ms. Jeffers for teaching me how to believe and trust in myself despite the fear.
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