#Trust30 Prompt: These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is fear holding you back from living your fullest life and being truly self expressed? Put yourself in the shoes of the you who’s already lived your dream and write out the answers to the following:
Is the insecurity you’re defending worth the dream you’ll never realize? or the love you’ll never venture? or the joy you’ll never feel?
I have had a difficult time with this prompt because it seems so similar to previous prompts in the series. It makes me wonder how Domino Project made these assignments to the guest authors. Like, did they write them all and say, “Come up with something from ‘Self-Reliance’ and send it to us”? Then perhaps they threw all the slips of papers with prompts in a hat and are drawing them out one by one?
Well I don’t know how they are coming up with the juxtaposition of prompts, but I feel like I faced this kind of fear when I did my dissertation. I had felt like the oldest extant Ph.D. student in the country and it was time to be finished. I was 99.9% of the way finished but couldn’t pull the trigger. I couldn’t slap on the concluding chapter and submit the thing. The fear was of what would happen once I was actually finished rather than “in process.” Finally, I tasered the inner perfectionist and let the chips fall where they finally fell. And, well, after a dissertation defense in which I perspired about fifty gallons of water I became doctor.
This seems to be a recurring theme in my life in connection with many projects. As I think back on the unfinished aspects of my life I wonder how many of them were 99 percent finished when I abandoned them? I like what Pressfield says about what we should do when we reach the frontier of our almost finished projects and begin to be fended off by fear of a world where we have completed our little work: “Just ship it!”