Most of the inaction I bear has been due to fear. Fear of reprimand and fear of violence in particular.
I’m reading a lot of lefty stuff (old posts, old articles, hoping I can make my way to books) and it seems like my biggest hurdle to becoming a proper leftist will be removing myself of these fears, if I ever want to do anything productive.
But fuck, fear is just so prevalent in my life. It could be my trauma, my privilege or literally anything else I’m not aware of. Whatever the cause, I don’t like it, it’s made me a worse person, and I wanna get rid of it.
Seeing as most of you are good about this, I want to hear about how you stopped letting fear and (social/physical) self-preservation control you.
Systematically breaking down outcomes into all the various possibilities and understanding the chances of them. Then planning around those effectively.
Fear is almost always because of limited planning and the potential of something going badly due to some unknown thing. Properly understanding the various possibilities and planning for them turns something scary into a plan that needs to be put into action. If the points of failure in the plan are potential for execution errors then practice.
I understand this is a very mechanical approach.