Picture two people cancelling their skydiving experience on the morning of the jump.
The first has wanted to skydive for years, despite her fear of heights. She booked the jump for her birthday and has been talking about it for weeks.
Then her birthday arrives. She wakes up feeling a bit anxious. Her mind starts producing a small documentary series about parachutes failing. She cancels and feels both a wave of relief and a sinking feeling that fear has just stolen something she was really excited about.
Her best friend never wanted to go skydiving in the first place. It’s not his thing, but his friends jokingly called him a ‘pussy’. He didn’t want to spoil the birthday fun, so when the others booked him a spot, he went along with it.
The morning of the jump, he decides to cancel.
From the outside, they’ve made exactly the same decision. One avoided something she wanted. The other stopped abandoning his own desires.
We’ve become strangely obsessed with making courage look like forward motion. Take the leap, leave your comfort zone, feel the fear and do it anyway.
That advice contains one enormous assumption: that you actually want whatever is waiting on the other side of the fear. But it’s missing the point that sometimes you don’t.
Sometimes the courageous thing is jumping out of the plane and sometimes it’s staying firmly on the ground while everyone else calls you a pussy.
That’s where the line between avoidance and self-abandonment becomes important. Avoidance is saying no when you want to say yes because yes feels scary. Self-abandonment is saying yes when you want to say no because no feels scary.
Both are driven by fear, but the fear points in opposite directions. With avoidance, you fear the experience itself. With self-abandonment, you fear what might happen if you honour yourself. Someone could be disappointed or think you’re difficult, selfish or boring.
Real life is rarely this neat, of course. We can want and not want something at the same time. The challenge is working out whether fear is pulling us away from something we want, or pushing us towards something we don’t.
Avoidance protects you from uncertainty. Self-abandonment protects you from disapproval. Self-abandonment is easy to mistake for courage because it often involves doing the harder-looking thing. Yet saying no to someone can require just as much courage as saying yes, sometimes more.
Courage needs a fuller definition: knowing what you truly want, then acting accordingly even when fear comes along.
Of course, knowing what you genuinely want can be difficult. Fears, old wounds and other people’s opinions can become one big psychological smoothie.
When I’m unsure which fear I’m dealing with, two questions tend to cut through the smoothie.
The first: if I knew, without any doubt, that I could handle the experience, would I still want to do it? This one isolates the fear of the unknown from the desire itself. If the answer is yes, the fear is standing between you and something you genuinely want, and that’s usually a sign to move towards it anyway.
The second: if nobody in my life would be disappointed by my answer, would I still choose this? This one strips away the desire to manage other people’s feelings. If the answer is no, you’re probably not protecting yourself from the experience, you’re protecting someone else from their reaction to your no.
The two questions are pointing at different things. One tests whether fear is hiding a want. The other tests whether compliance is hiding a no. Ask both, and you’ll usually find out fairly quickly which kind of courage the moment is actually asking for.
Courage has less to do with moving forwards and more to do with staying loyal to what you know.
For the first skydiver, courage might mean getting onto the plane with shaking hands. For her friend, courage might mean saying no to the invitation despite being judged.
So yes, don’t be a pussy. Get on the plane if the plane is what you actually want. But if it isn’t, if you’re just afraid of what people will think when you say no, then the pussy move isn’t cancelling the jump. It’s staying quiet about the fact that you never wanted to jump at all.
Courage isn’t to do the scary thing, but to do the thing you actually want, even when admitting you don’t want the other thing is the scarier part.