Face Your Fear

My visa came in early. After everyone we’d been in contact with, seemingly everyone we’d met tell us that acquiring a visa was a process that would take three, maybe four months, I received the certificate to collect my visa form the Japanese government in a month and a half. Ostensibly, this is good news—you don’t want to be waiting for months and months to figure out when you’re going to be able to go—but it sent us into a panic. We’ve been working to button up our life here in America for the last few weeks; and now we had a deadline.

Recently, we saw off a friend of ours who has moved to Dublin. It felt like an incredible coincidence, that we knew not only so many others who had already moved abroad, but could commiserate with this friend about the process of actually doing it. We sympathized with each other’s uncertainties: they were looking for a job, but had a plane ticket, we’d found a job, but were waiting on the visa. At her going-away party, she asked us “if it felt real yet,” and we said it didn’t; there was too much still up in the air. We’d been living in a cloud of unknowing. But it now it feels very real; it started to feel real in a hurry.

I want to lean into this feeling, and find out where it takes me.

A wave of anxiety washed over me as I saw the documents. It might seem like a small thing, suddenly having to leave two weeks earlier than we’d anticipated. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized I was going to feel this way no matter when it came in. This fear, this anxiety—maybe it wasn’t unavoidable, but it’s not irrational. We’re upending everything we know to move to a new place, a new culture, halfway around the world. I’ve never even moved cities before.

I felt the same anxiety when the job offer came in. We’d talked about moving abroad, that was why I applied in the first place, but we were looking at Spring next year (this year). I felt like a dog that had caught a car. I hadn’t really expected to get this far, to be honest. But having the offer, the visa, come in early didn’t change our resolve. It didn’t change how I felt about wanting to try and have this adventure. No, it was not perfect, but would it ever be?

During the time I stepped back from writing, I felt like I was always waiting for the perfect storm. I was always reading craft books, thinking I would learn just the one piece I was missing, everything would fall into place, and the words would flow out of me like magic. I kept trying to clear mornings where I could sit at my desk for hours on end; these almost never came, and when they did, I didn’t write anyways. I knew this quote from Stephen King: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work,” but it didn’t translate into productivity for me. But it’s true, of course. The only option is to dive in headlong, and try your best.

I still feel afraid, anxious, from time to time. I try and remind myself how exciting this all is, and how this feeling isn’t unusual, isn’t even a bad thing. A baseball player who accepted a trade recently said the decision was one of the hardest of his life; and he didn’t even change timezones! It feels strange to realize this in the moment, but I’m embarking on the biggest change of my life so far.

Perhaps this is overstating it, but I’ve been thinking about this quote from Ethan Hawke recently: “Courage is our ability and willingness to overcome our fear. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, it is a powerful resource, reminding us to be wary, alert, and mindful. Fear is the dark and courage is the light. Fear is the call and courage is the answer.” I am afraid, unsure about the future. But there’s no way to know but doing; no way out but through. I set a big goal for myself, and I’m on the cusp of achieving it. It’s not easy, but it’s not supposed to be. I want to lean into this feeling, and find out where it takes me.