On Sunday June 10th, 2018, I finished a tiring ten-hour shift at the hospital and rushed, as usual, to the 7:45am mass at my local parish. As I sat in church debating whether to use the priest’s sermon time for good power nap, I noticed the blinking blue light on my phone. Incoming text message. Grateful for the distraction, I mouthed a silent “Sorry, Lord” heavenward and turned on my phone. It was a whatsapp message that read:

“Hey. It’s been a while. How are you doing? You are a really good and eloquent writer. Have you ever thought about writing a book?”

I stared at my phone in happy amazement for a few minutes, momentarily forgetting where I was. The message was from my good friend Jude. Earlier that week I had been on a bit of a Facebook status update binge, so to speak, writing about a few issues that had personally touched me. I can honestly say it was one of the best messages I have received before 9am in many years. I turned the phone off, and now fully awake, concentrated on the rest of the sermon and the mass.

As soon as the service was over, I responded to him. Yes, I had thought about writing a book. As a matter of fact, I was working on one at the moment. This was only half true-I had a title and a few pages that I had been sitting on for months, but I was not really ‘working’ on it. I explained to him that as much as I love writing (I truly do; it is very cathartic), I tended to digress so far from my intended topics that I almost always lose focus. So he said to me “Maybe you should start by writing a blog.” I told him that was great idea, and I would look into it.

I went home that day and spent the entire afternoon mulling over what we had talked about. I do love to write. I had a blog before, a few years ago, but my thoughts had fizzled out after a few posts and the page now lay dormant out on the world wide web. Did I really want to start another one? What would I write about? Who would want to read it? What if people don’t like what I’m saying? How ‘open’ will I have to be? I questioned myself over and over again until sundown, and then decided to shelf the idea for another day. I knew why I was asking those questions. I knew it had nothing to do with blogging or lack of material or anything like that. What was preventing me from writing was much deeper and harder for me to recognize and accept. I was afraid.

My name is Veronique. I was born in Cameroon, West Africa, some twenty-seven years ago. I consider myself a scientist in the mind and an artist at heart. I am a self-proclaimed Jane-of-all-trades. My tastes and preferences run in all directions. When I was a child, I dreamed of a life of adventure and travel. As a teenager, I hoped to meet vast numbers and types of people, to learn from them, and understand what the vast world that lay beyond us had in store for me. My family and I were blessed with a move to America over a decade ago, and I felt those dreams blossom in my mind. Everyone knew America was the Promised Land. Every potential could be realized, every dream achieved. I entered this country bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and with a head full of ideas. Almost suddenly, however, I began to understand that life would not be any easier here than it had been back home. I got my first job barely two weeks after I entered the USA, and I have worked ever since. I did not do any substantial traveling until 2016, and even then it was mainly for visiting family and not for touristic purposes.

In the beginning of this year, I left my family for a new job a few states away. I was sitting at work one day listening my co-workers-young ladies between 24 and 30 years old-talk about the different experiences in the lives: college, boyfriends, travel, and I came to a sudden and very sad realization-my life up until that point had been totally mundane. For many of us, life in the states is one big hamster wheel. Go to school, go to work, go home, repeat. Occasionally we go out and meet friends, make memories, but it my case, even that was hard to come by. See, besides my sisters and one or two very close friends (so close I might be offending them by calling them friends), I had no friends to speak of. I knew hundreds of people, and had many, many acquaintances, but there were days when I would scroll through the two hundred plus contacts on my phone and not find one person I could talk to about a particular situation.

When I  took my break that night I tried to figure out how and when my life got so stale. I tried to conjure up that bright, excited young girl who stepped off the plane in the summer of ’08, ready to take on the big, wide world, but all I saw was a blur. What happened to you, I cried silently to myself in that breakroom. How did I go from a girl with all these aspirations to a decade without a single realization of any of them? When did I lose my taste for adventure, my thirst for knowledge of things and people? When did I get so boring?

There are many instances in our lives that shape us in so many different ways. There is a website called Goalcast (https://www.goalcast.com/) where a number of inspirational videos are shown every day. One of the things I noticed watching some of the videos, especially those of celebrities, was that every single one of these inspirational people seemed to have overcome many adversities to get where they were. Inspiring as these videos were, they made me terribly sad. Not because I am immune to inspiration, but because every time I watched them, I realized what I had done with the obstacles in my life. My family and I (my mother, my sisters and  my brother) have together and individually traversed many difficult situations in our lives. That day, sitting in that dimly lit breakroom, I finally realized what had happened to my dreams and aspirations all these years. Yes, I had gone to school, gotten degrees, and made a decent living. I had gone through these many troubling times and seemed to have done well in the aftermath. To the outsider looking in, my life was alright-two degrees, nice job, okay money. But I realized, instead of overcoming these adversities and using them to drive me forward and give me zeal to chase things that interested me, I had built a wall. Slowly, so slowly I did not realize it until that very moment, I had constructed a mighty wall that had crushed my aspirations and almost snuffed out the light around my dreams. I had built a Fortress of Fear.

Physically, I am not afraid of many things. Spiders? Eh. Clowns? Really? Sickness, natural disasters, plane crashes, car accidents, drowning, terrorists, dying? Well, we will all die sometime, on way or another. No, my fears ran far deeper than that. This is something I have never been able to explain to anyone else. No one has ever been able to fully comprehend what it feels like. To be so afraid that you throat closes up, your brain freezes, your eyes sting, and all you want to do is curl up in a small ball and rock yourself back and forth. It was hard to explain because people did not seem to understand what the big deal was. I recall once in college a friend saying to me “I never see you with anyone. You don’t seem to have any friends.” When I explained that I have a really hard time making friends, he patted me on the back and said “You just need to smile more. And not be so awkward.” And that was it. What he did not understand was that every time I met someone or was in a group of people, I could not find words. I had nothing to say. I always felt I was searching for words, like my brain had lost its internet connection and the dark screen just flashed the words “reconnecting…” It seemed irrational to others, but I was scared to make friends, I was scared to try new things because I was afraid of failing, I was afraid of taking risks. Even now, writing this, I am not sure if I will end up publishing it because I am afraid of baring myself open, being vulnerable, being seen.

Because of this fear, I have crippled myself. I unwittingly sheltered myself from drama, from heartbreak, from pain. Or at least I tried. Those things are a part of life, and no matter how hard we try, there’s just no escaping them. I played my entire life safe, and then one day I realized I was not really living. I was coasting through life, afraid to make any moves. That, I realized, is not the purpose of life. Life is meant to be lived. There is no way to experience life without actual experiences. I spend many hours of my life inside the comfort and safe haven that is my home, wishing I was outside, watching other people live out the dreams I had conjured up myself all those many years ago. Some days I would hold my head in my hands and weep bitterly-if X and Y can do this, why can’t I? I would cry myself to exhaustion, and then go back to bed, back to work, back to the hamster wheel.

That day, siting at work, I decided it was enough. I needed to get off  my hamster wheel. This fear was an anchor. A very heavy one. I needed to break it off. Life waits for no one. I had to let it go. But how?

Sometime after that night I took a trip to Philadelphia from Maryland. I decided to find a good book to accompany me on my way there, and I fell upon Shonda Rhimes’ “Year of Yes.”

(Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Year-Yes-Dance-Stand-Person/dp/1476777128)

For those who do not know Shonda, she is the powerhouse behind TGIT-Grey’s Anatomy, How to get away with Murder, Scandal and the new Station 19. Now, I am a huge (HUUGGEE) fan of Grey’s Anatomy, and happening upon Ms. Rhimes’ book that morning was like falling upon the right verse in the Bible right when you needed it. I laughed, cried and reflected my way throughout the book (I had the audio version, so listening to Shonda herself recount stories was like chatting with a friend in the car), and by the time I arrived I knew what I needed: I needed my own Year of Yes. I did not even need a year. I just needed to say “yes.” Yes to things that scared me, to experiences that terrified me, yes to meeting new people, yes to learning new things, just “yes.” I returned home resolved to start anew, to break the walls of fear that had risen far above me.

Even with this, knowing what to do, and actually doing it, are two completely different things. I read that book in February. I knew I needed to change the way my life was going. Still, I balked. My book still sat there, first three chapters, draft after unfinished draft. Friends and acquaintances had baby showers, engagement parties, other celebrations, and I always had to work. Granted this was a valid excuse, but I could have done a better job of making myself available. I continued to play safe. Even after Jude sent me that encouraging message, even after he directed me to other resources to get more info, I still found excuses. See, Jude is a blogger as well, and together with his wife found something they were passionate about and decided to share with the world. Their blog ‘africanstylefi.com’, discusses how to manage finances and other monetary matters, something which I believe is very crucial to know in the world today, especially to us millennials as we enter and go through the professional world. He offered to give me tips on how to write, told me to write about whatever I feel inspired to write about, and I was still afraid-what if people did not read my blog?  What if I was laughed at? What if no one understood what this fear was like? What it was doing to me? So, again, I put it aside and went my to my humdrum life.

Two days ago, out of the blue I decided to try something I have wanted to try since I first moved to North Carolina. By 7pm that night, I felt something in me change. I had done it. I had taken the first step, and chipped away at a little of that wall of fear around my life. To onlookers it may have been nothing, but to me it a great big leap forward. I know now that the only thing separating us from the things we can do is the fear that we cannot do them, that we might fail. I left that night on a high, and this inspired me to officially begin this blog. Even as I sat down to begin this blog, I realized a whole one hundred days had passed since I got that message from my friend. One hundred days in my hamster wheel. But I lived one fear a few days back, and today,  I am ready to live another one. My blog is going to be about this-finally attempting things I put off doing for years out of fear, and the lessons I learn as I go along. They may be small things-ride a bicycle, make a new friend, try a new sport. Everything to me is a potential teaching moment. As I will describe in my next post, this one small venture from a few days ago taught me so many things about myself: I am strong, I am resilient, and fear is nothing but a mind-numbing illusion. I hope you will come on this journey with me, and I hope to inspire you to try things to overcome the fears in your own life.

Until next time,

Veronique.