For most of my life, I believed I was fearless. Or rather, I believed I had negotiated some unspoken détente with the universe: If I can keep functioning at the level you demand, you will not ask me to feel what I cannot afford to feel.
And for decades, this worked. Or seemed to.
I built a business during the Great Financial Crisis. I moved countries eight times, sometimes with only a few weeks’ notice. I navigated relationships, heartbreak, reinvention, and reinvention after reinvention — all the while carrying the quiet conviction that fear was something I had somehow outrun through strategy and sheer competence.
However, it wasn’t courage. It was adaptive invincibility — a survival mechanism so elegant it fooled even me. I wasn’t fearless; I was simply armored.
The architecture of the dam
Somewhere in the deep interior of my psyche, a dam had been built. Not consciously, not ceremonially — more like the way a river gradually deposits enough silt to alter its own course. Every overwhelming experience was quietly redirected behind that structure: fear, grief, vigilance, uncertainty, the shocks I refused to metabolize.
The dam was not strength. It was containment.
And containment held — until it didn’t.
Last September, traveling through Australia, Luxembourg, and Germany, I noticed a shift I had no language for yet. Airports — the places I once strode through like they were second homes — suddenly felt charged, unpredictable. My nervous system, stripped of its usual discipline, began leaking signals I had no practice receiving.
Then came the panic attack. In public. Unsanctioned. Unarguable.
It seeded a new fear: not of the world, but of my own body’s unpredictability. Could this happen mid-flight? Mid-talk? Mid-facilitation? Mid-anything?
The dam had cracked. And once cracks form, the water remembers it has somewhere to go.
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This wasn’t the first dam in my life to strain
In my earlier essay — Is Depression the Inevitable Cost of Changemaking? — I argued that people who work in impact roles metabolize a unique form of grief: the grief for what could have been.
Changemakers learn early that heartbreak is part of the job. We take in what is unbearable for others. We stabilize what others flee. We carry the emotional residue without asking where it should go.
But we rarely ask what happens to us when the system never gets to empty. Grief accumulates. Fear accumulates. Vigilance accumulates. And because we are competent — sometimes frighteningly so — we continue to function long after the internal cost becomes unsustainable.
When competence becomes a form of self-betrayal
What I used to call bravery — what others admired as resilience — was not fearlessness at all. It was a kind of quiet sabotage of my nervous system, a repeated overriding of signals meant to protect me. Every time I pushed through exhaustion, flew through heartbreak, or solved crises because “I always do,” a tax was levied against my body that I refused to acknowledge.
This is the strange thing about long-term adaptive competence: it doesn’t feel like harm. It feels like capability.
Until the bill arrives.
Tasks that once energized me began crackling with static. Uncertainty — once my natural habitat — became a source of tension. Even benign decisions carried an electric sharpness, as if something in me had finally lost its shock-absorbing capacity.
Courage without recovery isn’t resilience. It’s slow erosion.
Fear wasn’t my enemy. But ignoring it was.
The price of never letting yourself be afraid
We celebrate people who “act despite fear,” but rarely question what happens when that becomes a lifestyle. Fear — evolutionarily speaking — is not an enemy. It’s a sentinel. A guide. A source of orientation.
But I had spent years treating fear like an incompetent intern: useless, inconvenient, and best ignored.
So, my system found another way to get my attention. It cracked the dam. It forced a breach.
Fear wasn’t trying to stop me. It was trying to speak. My reflection on this can be found in an earlier post.
When the water meets air
I’ve begun noticing things: that my hands get clammy when I’m moving too fast, that my chest tightens when I override my own pacing, that my intuition whispers “rest” long before I allow myself to hear it.
And so, this new phase of my life — accommodating the honesty of my system — has humbled me more than any external challenge ever did.
Just because I can doesn’t mean I should. Just because I’ve survived everything so far doesn’t mean I always will. Neither should it keep collecting a toll from my body.
Fear was never the problem. My refusal to acknowledge it was.
What might this mean for you?
If you’re a person who carries responsibility, impact, courage, or care — you likely have your own dam. A structure your nervous system built on your behalf, long before you ever granted permission.
Consider:
* Where are the cracks forming?(fatigue, irritability, overthinking, sudden indecision, anxiety, stress-eating)
* What signals has your body been sending that your mind has been overriding?
* Where has competence replaced care? (This one is almost always the quietest).
* Are you confusing endurance with resilience?
Fear is not a stop sign. It’s a sign of life. It means your system is still trying to participate in the conversation.
Closing: the new agreement
If I once made a deal with the universe to be invincible, I am putting a new one on the table; care to join me?
I will no longer abandon my body for my ambition. I will no longer exile my fear in the name of being impressive. I will listen. I will pace. I will rest. I will allow my humanness to have a seat at the table.
Invincibility is intoxicating, yes. But honesty — lived fully, embodied, not negotiated away — may be the truest form of courage I’ve identified thus far.
