I called my mom on New Years Day. It’s a non-negotiable and everything is generally on the agenda. I am my mother’s son, which means that she has the ability to catch any inflection of my voice or speech, and diagnose it perfectly. I explained to her, that I was struggling. I said I was scared. She took a deep breathe, cleared her throat, and said the following:

When it comes to you and your brother, my prayers are the same. I’ve already buried one child, I don’t know what I would do if I had to bury another. There is no telling what might take you, or when. It’s hard, so I all I can do is pray. 

Love, in its purest form, is a form of sacrifice. When we love people, we inconvenience ourselves for their benefit. When we love our dreams we won’t count how much it costs to do certain things. Self-love is a revolutionary act. When we love people, we don’t count favors.

The opposite of love, isn’t hate though. It’s fear.

Being afraid is a natural human response. Our bodies react to  stimuli a certain way, and we make decisions off of the information in that moment. Living in fear, however, is a completely different scenario. Fear is being scared that something might happen to you. Living in fear is being petrified about your person hood, and the knowing that it can  be violated on a whim, and ended because of a mistake.

That fear is doggedly persistent. It’s generationally agnostic, and creates  a numbness that cuts deep and wide.  I don’t have to be on a random block in a under-resourced community, to die. I can be coming home from a mixer, with too much money in my pocket, adjusting my belt, with fatal consequences. I have friends that don’t want to even broach the conversation of children, because it means understanding that they can only protect them until they can’t. But it’s not just about violence. It’s about art too.

fighting ‘the resistance’

I get scared a lot. Every single time I hit “Publish”, a little gnawing feeling creeps into my stomach. Any writer will tell you, that oftentimes, you’re only as good as your last clip or byline. Those are hard to come by, and often harder to sustain, especially when you begin to talk about things that aren’t popular.   I thought I might get fired for writing about not bringing my whole self to work.  This is the internet. Tweets get watched, posts are analyzed, and Snapchats get indexed. But the truth is only an inconvenience when you don’t want to deal with it. That’s my reality, so the choice was clear: either use a platform I have, or neglect it and keep pretending like it didn’t keep me up at night. I don’t want to have a public persona that invokes the former, but a private life that embraces the latter. You shouldn’t either.

I have friends who hate their jobs, but are scared to leave. Afraid to write that screenplay they hid in their Dropbox, because it’s not good enough to land a pilot. But that internal struggle we have to face greatness head on, is a beautiful one. The incessant wrestling and toil to figure out what the barriers are, is often an indication that something worth producing is in progress. We simply have to hold on long enough to let it come to bear.

Appreciate their support, but understand you don’t need their approval. Ever.

Feel that fear, then do it anyway. Sometimes all we have, is exactly what we need.