I want to start my emotions series with being scared.
I was born in a small village in Henan province. I didn’t travel much growing up, but I always wanted to see the world. So even though I knew my family couldn’t support me to study abroad, after my bachelor’s, I still tried to find a way.
I looked into studying in the U.S. That turned out to be a dead end when you don’t have money. But through my research, I found out about Canada’s master’s programs, which had scholarships. So I applied.
I could have stayed. I would have gotten into a good graduate program in China. That was the safe choice. And honestly, I was afraid. What if I made the wrong choice? By that time, I hadn’t even taken a flight before. I knew nothing about Canada — I thought Toronto was the capital. There was so much uncertainty.
Yet I did it. And I think I never properly acknowledged how scared I was.
Looking back, fear has been there at a lot of turning points in my life. I was scared when I quit my first job. I was scared when I chose to move to Europe. I was scared when I had to have a difficult conversation with my parents.
In Naming My Emotions, I talked about a moment that made me realize something. I was browsing online, looking at a course. And I noticed myself hesitating. I was about to close the tab. I was telling myself I’d think more about it later.
You might think it’s easy to recognize when you’re scared. But actually, it isn’t. Fear doesn’t always show up as fear. It shows up as excuses — and good ones. Am I really interested in this course? The timing doesn’t work for me. Maybe I should wait until next year. My brain came up with many plausible reasons not to do it. And each one on its own sounded reasonable.
But when I stopped and actually sat with what I was feeling, the truth was different. Yes, the course looked interesting. Yes, I could afford to take a few weeks off work. The reasons not to do it weren’t real obstacles. They were cover stories.
Behind all of them was the familiar, less comfortable truth: I was scared. Scared to start something new and different. Scared that I might not be good at it. Scared that trying something so different at this stage of my life might be a mistake. And my brain, instead of letting me feel that, went straight into manufacturing excuses. Because excuses are easier to sit with than fear.
This is what I was trying to say in the first piece. When you don’t learn to pay attention to your feelings, you don’t stop having them. You just lose the ability to recognize them.
And here’s what I noticed: naming it changes something. It doesn’t make the fear go away. I still felt scared after I admitted it to myself. But something shifted.
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about this in Big Magic. She says you cannot get rid of fear — and you shouldn’t try. Fear is the passenger in the car. It’s allowed to come along for the ride. It can even have a seat. But it doesn’t get to hold the map. It doesn’t get to touch the steering wheel. And it definitely doesn’t get to choose where you’re going. You are the driver.
I love that image. Because that’s exactly what it felt like. The fear didn’t leave. But once I named it, it moved from the driver’s seat to the back. When I was lost in the excuses, I was stuck — I couldn’t move forward because I was arguing with reasons that weren’t even real. The moment I said I’m scared, the fake reasons fell away. And what was left was a much clearer question: is this fear telling me to protect myself, or is it telling me I care about this enough to be afraid of failing?
Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art, put it simply: the more scared you are of something, the more important it probably is to you. Fear and meaning point in the same direction. If something didn’t matter to you, it wouldn’t scare you. You’d just shrug and move on.
For the course I was considering, the answer was obvious once I stopped hiding from it. I cared. I wanted to try. The fear wasn’t a warning. It was a signal.
So I booked a filmmaking course for this summer. I don’t know if it will go well. I don’t know if I’ll be good at it. The version of me who closed the tab or walked away — that version would have forgotten about it in a week. Or maybe not.
There’s a slogan that says: feel the fear and do it anyway. I like it a lot. But sometimes the brain hides that feeling from us. It comes up with excuses instead of just letting us feel the fear. I think it’s because we don’t like to admit we’re scared. Admitting it feels like a weakness.
That’s actually why I wanted to write this. It’s okay to admit that we’re scared. It’s okay to be scared. And when we know we’re scared, sometimes I think we make better decisions.