Holding Back The Fears

I was woken this morning by the ringing of my mobile phone; my ever-charming recruitment consultant James had a potential lead at a financial institution in the City. "I can't promise that it would lead to a vacancy," he told me, "but my contact seemed interested, so can I forward your details to him? It's likely that it'll lead to a temporary job, but like I said, at this stage I can't promise that it definitely will."

I've been hearing this virtually every day in the past two months, so I gave him my usual jaded yes. I hung up and spent the rest of the morning pondering last night's revelation about a colleague of my boyfriend who I know and had been, to everyone's knowledge, happy in his job.

It turns out that all this time he wasn't. My boyfriend (along with his inner circle) has been asked to keep this quiet, but the lad is quitting his job in 3 months, and going back to university to study a degree in politics. Needless to say, it came as a shock.

For me, it also brought home my own fears. I know I've been too scared to take the plunge all these years, but even now, when I am actually taking baby steps towards a career change, the idea of being out of an accountancy job brings me a mixture of relief... and terror. Last week's realisations that I'll have to alter my original game-plan of staying in that field until I'm "ready" to leap should have galvanised me into action, but it left me paralysed with fear.

What is it that I am so scared of? I questioned myself, and came up with the following answers:

1. I am scared of disappointing my family.
2. I am scared that the career change won't work out, and then I'll be left unemployable.
3. I am scared that I will have no money.
4. I am scared that I am being foolish, or expecting far too much from life or from work.
5. I am scared that, for all my overwhelming desire to write, I can't actually write. I am scared that I have no ability in that arena and that no-one would be interested in what I've got to say.
6. I am scared of being considered a failure.

I thought for a moment, then wrote down the following:

1. Striving for what I thought my family would approve of, led me up a path that I hated and felt I didn't fit into for ten years.
2. I won't know that until I try. Besides which, most of the most successful people are unemployable. That's why they've struck out on their own path.
3. My current "career" has actually ended up costing me far more (in expensive suits, training fees, salary deductions, severance fees, and emotional/health issues) than I've got out of it.
4. It's not expecting "far too much" from life to ask that "the good outweighs the bad" about one's job - as my lovely boyfriend constantly reminds me, spending 8 hours of one's waking moments per day (not even including travelling time) is too much time to spend being miserable.
5. According to the author Stephen King, Stephenie Meyer "can't write worth a damn". That hasn't stopped her Twilight series becoming one of the biggest-selling book series around the globe. Madonna (no offence to her fans) hasn't got as good a singing voice as many other pop singers, but hasn't let that stop her becoming the worldwide Queen of Pop.
6. I am fairly resourceful and self-reliant. Anything I've failed at in the past, I've tried harder, tried again or tried something different till I succeeded. Why should this time be any different?

It's not as if I don't have the knowledge or the tools to get writing, or explore other subjects I like (like sociology and English literature), or even to research some more how to break into another field; yet I find that fear is the biggest obstacle to taking any sort of action at all. It can even be worse than having a physical disability: once, when a sports injury meant I could barely walk for a week, it never stopped me showing up to work until I recovered (although my limp caused much amusement in the office). But being scared and fearful stops you from even limping to your destination, let alone walking to it. In fact, it makes you unable to move at all.

I suppose one way of moving forward, in spite of everything I'm afraid of, is to motivate myself by remembering just how bad it got - the searing chest pains, like red-hot knives, that I had before I quit that job last year were one example. How did the rest of you hold back any crippling fears you had?