Let's talk about the fear of being hurt.

When I was a kid, I lived either in the country or in the ghetto. I never lived in the suburbs.

In the ghetto, we lived across from a crack house, and in the country we lived with insects & other natural threats.

Once, when I was taking trash out in the country, I got stung.

In the time since I had last taken trash out, a few dozen paper wasps had decided to build a nest in the trashcan.

When I opened the lid, they all came out and said hello.

And by hello, I mean about six of them stung me in the face.

I'm not allergic, but it hurt like hell.

I had to make a choice, every time I took the trash out from then on: chicken out of doing my chore, or do my chore but whack the can each time and stand clear?

If you knew my mother, I became a can whacker.

See, the hurt, the EXTREME pain, had to be overcome. I couldn't let the difficulty of what I experienced define my actions.

I wanted to. It would have been easier to. I could have done a number of things to circumvent it.

But instead I did what I had to do.

Now let me give you a much weirder, more personal example, of what happens when someone chooses to obey their fear instead.

My biological father was a monster. And I don't mean that in literal sense, but I do mean it in the most extreme metaphoric sense possible. He was a deeply evil man. He was extremely abusive.

My mother, after she divorced him, wanted to have nothing to do with anyone like him.

I get that, really I do, but there was an aspect of her actions that was entirely unhealthy.

My father was very traditionally masculine: smoked, drank, hunted, owned numerous guns, farmed, drove a truck, drank black coffee, etc.

He was a "man's man."

Sidebar: I don't think of any of those qualities outside of being a gun-nut, as being unhealthy, per se. I am just saying they are traditionally viewed as masculine.

So now that I have laid that groundwork, what unhealthy behavior did my mother engage in as a reaction against my father?

Well, she rejected ANYTHING that could have been interpreted as traditionally masculine. For herself... and for me.

No, she did not encourage me to write poetry. No, she did not tell me about the joys of cooking. No, she didn't do anything to encourage me away from toxic masculinity.

Instead she dressed me in girl's clothing.

Nothing overt, like dresses or that kind of thing, but just jeans and shirts made and cut for girls. I hated it. I was made fun of, relentlessly for it.

Any time I chose clothes for boys, she would get offended. She would tell me how ugly they were. She would sorta throw a fit.

She did this because she didn't want me to become like my father.

She did it because she was hurt and was attempting to solve the problem in a twisted and unhealthy way.

So why talk about something like this? Because there might be someone reading this who is, right now, attempting to treat the hurts in their lives in a way that refuses to acknowledge them. Some of you might be using fear as a steering wheel, not a gas pedal.

I want to live my life, and lead the people I am granted influence with, based not on what *might* hurt me. I want to live my life free of being pushed around by what *might* hurt me.

And I want that for you too.

That's all I have for today.