Sitting With Fear
How I went from managing my life to feeling it
There is something I need to confess. For years, I worked unnecessarily hard. I was always busy. And whenever a moment of silence fell, I quickly invented something new to do. The feeling of doing nothing frightened me so deeply that I kept myself in constant motion.
The feeling of doing nothing — I could not bear it back then.
Only later did I understand what was really going on. That constant pushing forward, that perpetual state of action — it wasn’t discipline. It was flight. It was fear. Existential fear, to be precise. The fear that if I stopped acting, something terrible would happen. What exactly? Irrelevant. That is what makes existential fear so existential.
The Core Misunderstanding
Fear creates a narrative. My story was this: “If I stop working hard, things will go wrong.” This is fear in disguise. Stopping felt too dangerous. I didn’t dare stop. My fear in disguise had taken the wheel.
My Moment of Clarity
I had dangerously high blood pressure, frequently. My heart rate was often elevated too. Especially at the doctor’s office. Fortunately I was wise enough not to take medication for it. Yet I still didn’t hear the real message. I just kept working. We call that resilience. Perseverance. That was me.
And then this happened: I became aware that I was constantly managing my outcomes. I realized I had very little trust — in the universe, in my own inner life. I felt my deepest fear of following my feelings. I experienced my existential fear. And instead of running from it, I stayed with it. It was a feeling that held both pain and pleasure at once.
Narrative Guido
That’s when it clicked. I had turned my fear into a narrative. I placed my trust entirely in that fear narrative. In my own story. Narrative Guido knows best. Narrative Guido will manage it.
Existential fear blocks you from who you truly are — and can at the same time be the very entrance to who you truly are.
Through that realization I understood I could learn to trust my being, my self-awareness. My body, my being, became my compass.
Hard Work Kept Me From Feeling
I understood I had a choice. Did I want to keep working unnecessarily hard? Or did I want to feel what I needed to do, and move with the flow of life? I chose to see life as a celebration in which I continuously receive gifts. The universe gives constantly. There are always surprises. I choose to see every experience as a gift. I stopped managing my life.
My high blood pressure and my unnecessary hard work were gifts — ones that gave me insight into my True Self.
Existential Fear
I used hard work to silence my existential fear. I chose to feel that fear instead. Feeling it brought me to the understanding that I no longer need to manage my life. I now feel what I need to do.
What do you fill your existential fear with?