Bravery, courage, lack of fear. All of these words are all synonymous. One can be replaced with the other and yet what do they mean? How do you know if you are brave and how can you be brave when you are filled with fear? Does being brave by definition have to be something that scares you or makes you uncomfortable? Are you any less brave if you don’t feel these things? And how does fear play into all of this? One of my favorite quotes about such things is “courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear” – FDR.

As a public speaker on a controversial topic, I face fear and vulnerability on a regular basis. From the minute I decided to tell the world my story, I have had people tell me how brave I am and that it must have taken an extraordinary amount of courage to tell my story. The answer is yes, it was hard, probably the hardest thing I have ever done to date, but brave? I don’t know. I talk about things that make me uncomfortable and more importantly that make other people uncomfortable on a regular basis, well at least at this point in my life. The thing of it is though, I don’t feel very brave.

What people don’t realize is that I never talk about anything that actually makes me uncomfortable. Not really. Sure, some of the topics are scary, controversial and difficult, but by the time I talk about them out loud, publicly, I have analyzed, frankly over analyzed them to death, and made sure that I am 100% comfortable making my views known. I’m not very spontaneous, I don’t like to be vulnerable, and I have a tendency to be emotionally reckless when I already know what the outcome will be. In short, I do a really good job of “looking” brave, but yet I often don’t feel very brave. I guess you could argue that while I am talking about these topics, am I really being that vulnerable if I am waiting until I am comfortable so that I can control the situation?

We all want to believe we are brave and that we are making a difference. I want to believe that I am facing my fears, that I am staring them in the face and that I am conquering them. I’ve always had this warrior image of myself and part of that image is fighting back against anything that scares me. The thing that scares me the most though? It’s being vulnerable and it’s being vulnerable with someone I care about when I’m usually not sure how they feel about me back.

As I said, I have a tendency to be emotionally reckless, but even that, that is my way of controlling a situation where I have very little control. It is my way of restoring balance and putting myself back where others can’t hurt me. Ironically, it’s not hard to tell someone that you are interested in them or ask them out, when you know they are going to say no; it’s only hard when you don’t know if they are going to say no or not. When you know what the outcome is going to be, good or bad, that puts you in control, it erases the fear and the doubt and by definition it makes the action “less brave”. Am I really being vulnerable telling someone I am interested in that I like them if I know I have nothing to lose because the answer is no? Not really.

We are our own harshest critics. That point has always been well established and well known. What I think isn’t brave or courageous for myself I would think was brave and courageous for someone else. Maybe it doesn’t matter how we feel, maybe that has nothing to do with it, maybe the action of being courageous is simply that in and of itself and whether or not we feel brave while doing it doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t matter how we go about facing our fears, be it by controlling the situation or by being reckless. Maybe just maybe the thing that matters is that in whatever way we are doing it we are doing it, plain and simple. We are moving forward, one small step at a time, and maybe we should all give ourselves a little grace for doing just that.