How to Have Courage When You Have None

Trying something new or trying to stop yourself from doing something that is familiar to you takes a lot of courage. But what if you don’t have it?

Last month, I started to list everything that I find inspirational or motivational on the internet and drop them on my Notion under ‘Mindset Delta’. What a ridiculous name, I know. I started this project to somehow create a journal that I can use when I want to sound wise to my friends. It’s funny but that is how it began. I started it with the thought that I will just probably drop this project when I had enough of it, like I always do to a lot of stuffs that I started doing. Evaluating myself over and over for the last 22 years, I have come to realize that I am good at starting projects or task that I find amusing at the moment but somehow drop them when I no longer find them interesting.

I tried starting a journal at the beginning of my freshman year in college, bought the notebooks and all, but then I stopped before even filling half of it. I started a blog because I thought going digital is better than old school journalling but I deleted my account a month after. I started downloading movies and sorting them out per year and stored them in a hard drive (there was no Netflix then) but then I stopped when I had no storage left. I thought that I was abandoning them because I don’t find them interesting anymore but what I realized was that I am afraid of trying new things.

My friends would say that I am bold to try new things. Little did they now that I only try to dip in the surface because I am the biggest coward out of us all. I don’t put enough effort to things that I know I won’t get anything big out of it. Putting up a mask and pretend that I muster courage is a lie that I have mastered for years. When things get rough, I would just come back to what feels familiar to me. Because it’s easy, because it’s comforting.

I am afraid to fall, to try something out of my comfort zone and think that I would possibly fail. I love the feeling of being on the top that I am afraid that a small failure would break me. When I hit rockbottom, I felt anger, shame, and disappointment towards myself. It kept me up at night, playing the exact same scenario in my head piling it with other mistakes I made in the past. I am hard on myself. I am not used to failing so obviously I am not good at handling it. That is why I despise the feeling of it and try to put them inside the little boxes at the back of my head.

They say that you discover a lot of about a person when they are at their lowest point. They were right, I get to know myself, contemplating about what I have been doing all my life that led me to where I am now. Trying to ask myself if it was all worth it. What’s the point of being on top all the time if you’ve been doing the same things all the time? What’s the point of being the good at one thing when everyone around you is out there exploring the vastness of what life offers.

When I started Mindset Delta, I never intended on carrying it on or getting something out of it. I just wanted something where I can dump my mind trash that is not a blog or a drive. Surprisingly, I get to learn a lot from it, I tend to see things in a different perspective than I do before. I have this somewhat journal where I can reflect and be reminded that life is not just about living in one point. That life is an array of points with lessons, experiences, and ups and downs. That life is about trying new things, of endless discovery.

Trying new things, it’s terrifying at some point but it’s also fulfilling if you manage to move from that point to another. It is better to have many viable options than staying stuck to just one. The point is, if you stay and not improve yourself, you’ll be missing the whole point (bigger picture). More than thinking of it as terrifying, more than the feeling the you would fail, try to feel what it’s like if you don’t. You don’t have to have a lot of courage, you just have to have to think that you have. Start from that and eventually you will muster courage.

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