I’ve got a lot of balls in my life right now – figuratively and literally. I’m juggling my freelance work, the adoption process and my own writing. Balls. I’m trying to learn how to play tennis. Balls. I’m figuring out how to make things grow in the garden. Root balls. I’m cleaning up after my cat. Hairballs. And then there are the white hairs that the MR. has discovered on…yes…his balls. Upon learning this last little fun factoid, I think my exact words to the MR. were: “I got enough balls to worry about right now. I don’t have time to worry about yours.”
Worrying is a big theme with me. Not sure if I was a worrier as a little kid, but somewhere along the way, the fear switch turned on and got stronger with each passing year.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve worried about people liking me, about following the rules, about being really bad at sports (kickball, softball, basketball, dodgeball. damn balls.), about people dying, about whether I left the curling iron on, about getting cancer, about letting a friend down, about whether people like my writing, about being a good person, about getting complacent, about gaining weight, about the new wrinkles on my forehead, about watching too much TV, about spending too much time thinking about sad things, about being a failure, about getting pregnant, about…everything.
It’s an exhausting list to write—let alone live—and I imagine it’s overwhelming to read. But fear and worry are powerful things. They’re like Darth Vader and the Emperor from Star Wars, plotting in their evil chamber about how to bring others to the dark side. Defeating them takes a lot of courage—not to mention a killer pair of Princess Leia hairbuns.
For the last year, I’ve been talking about my fears in therapy because I believed that if I talked about them, they would shrivel up and die. But something clicked at my tennis lesson a few weeks ago when my coach said, “You have to hit the ball with COURAGE, Darrah.” I realized that I was saying all the right things in therapy, but wasn’t actually walking through the fire. At some point, talk is cheap. If I really wanted to stop living my life frozen by fear, I was going to have to take a different approach.
So, I hung a photo of Princess Leia over my desk and called Obi Wan (a.k.a my tennis coach) to increase my lessons to twice a week. It may take me a lot of court time to find my courage, but I’m going to grab my fear by the tennis balls. And then I’ll try applying it to the rest of my life. And my writing. May the force be with me.
