Fear disappears when I'm grateful

But so does my desire to write

“If you rest, you rust.” - Helen Hayes

MY MUM AND DAD separated when I was three and they haven't really spoken to each other since then. I'm now in my thirties and, last week, both of them—independently of each other—offered me a piece of feedback about my essay writing.

My dad said, "Where's all the jokes? Where's the fun?”

And my mum said, "It's a bit serious sometimes, love. It comes across as quite serious for you."

It's true. In my life off the page, I’m a lot lighter. I love banter and sarcasm and dry British humour, dad jokes and pranks and all that good stuff.

One of my favourite memes

Me and my girlfriend even have childish names for each other. We throw ourselves on the floor and run away in fake tantrums. Obviously, only when no one's watching.

But I’d really like to put more personality into my essays and I think it’s hard because I’m scared of coming across like an amateur. I’m trying to impress people, to become known as someone influential with great ideas. I wanna say things in just the right way. And at some level, I feel like my unvarnished self spilling onto the page is going to work against me.

“Once you start to ‘take something seriously,’ parts of your brain can literally stop working.” - David Perell

In looking for solutions for this, I thought about other writers and artists to see what they had to say about fear.

I remembered the novelist Frank Herbert and his plot-defining dictum that runs throughout his Dune novels, "Fear is the mind killer." The way I experience that in my own practice is that I literally can’t think of ideas. Or when I do, I can’t figure out how to say them clearly.

I also remembered that Stephen King has said, "Fear is at the root of all bad writing.” And I'm pretty sure George Orwell said something similar.

It seems to me that fear is at the root of bad anything. It’s a horrible feeling when I’m writing—like being straightjacketed. It’s completely unenjoyable, too, to write like that. And to make matters worse, I know that my discomfort—my formality and seriousness—comes across to the reader and is not fun to read.

And then, I suddenly remembered something—like a superhero piercing through the clouds towards me—Tony Robbins, the coach, used to say in his audio tapes that "fear disappears when you're grateful."

Yes! Fear disappears when I’m grateful!

I know that’s true because I did Tony’s exercises when I was running my business back in 2018. I’d go on long, strident walks through Tooting Common, reciting affirmations out loud (and probably scaring the shit out of a few people in the process):

"I'm so grateful to be alive!”

“I'm so grateful to breathe the air I'm breathing!”

“I'm so grateful for my parents, for Corina, my mates, my work!”

My mind would expand, like a ripple across a lake, to include every thing and every one I was grateful for—and I’d go to work feeling optimistic and buzzing. I was amazed how effective gratitude was at pushing out fearful thoughts. It was almost as if my mind was a 2-way water valve and when gratitude flowed, fear was blocked.

So, as I was saying, regarding my parents’ feedback, I thought, "Well, okay. If fear is the root of bad writing—and if fear disappears when I’m grateful—then maybe cultivating gratitude is the answer to becoming a more authentic writer."

To test this, I ran a short experiment. I spent five minutes sitting at a desk with my eyes closed picturing all the things I'm grateful for. I'm so grateful for the free time I’ve got to write. I'm so grateful for my laptop, for the internet, for all the books and blogs I’m reading. I'm so grateful for my writing community and their feedback. I'm so grateful for my subscribers.

And in less than five minutes, I did feel good. I felt awesome, in fact. I was smiling, sitting back in my chair, breathing deeply. I was excited to get going.

I didn’t have any of the worries that I usually have—worries about publishing late, about being laughed at (for the wrong reasons), about getting stuck. No wariness of making readers confused or bored or offending them. No anxiety at all.

But—and here's the big but—I also found that I didn’t want to write anything.

Everything felt ideal just as it was. I had nothing to say, no urge to act.

It was nice, but I also felt a kind of “writer’s impotence.” I just sat there looking at a lamp on the wall with its lopsided diffuser and only one bulb working…thinking, “Essays? Writing? Why bother?”

A few seconds later, I snapped out of it and reminded myself that I do wanna write! I wanna spar. There’s a unique enjoyment—or flow—that I get from wrestling with ideas and making breakthroughs. It doesn’t always happen (and I’m terrified of it never coming back) but when it does, it’s magic.

And if I don’t do it, if I put off writing, if I put off talking to people about ideas and just live at the superficial level of events and weather and Netflix shows, it doesn’t take long till I start to feel pinned down and anxious and stripped of my potential. I have to think my way out of the submission.

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann

My writing recently has mostly been about the challenges and surprises of writing itself. I wrote about having a niche that changes. About creation versus analysis. About complaints being useful prompts. And off the back of that complaint essay, I wanted to write this essay about gratitude—since gratitude is the rough opposite of complaint—and ultimately make something that was useful in helping writers get unstuck.

But my experiment didn’t work. Gratitude disempowered me. And in the end, I realised, that what I needed was tension.

When you think about it, a story’s not a story without tension. That’s probably more obvious in fiction than nonfiction but it’s true in both, I think. Imagine you were asked to read an essay (assuming you like reading essays) about a guy who is just so damn grateful and content with his life and he’s just basically thanking everybody and typing out a list of things he values. How much would you want to read it, on a scale of 1 to 10?

Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s so much art—and art making—that can be about pure gratitude and appreciation and be incredibly moving. I’m thinking of so much music and painting and architecture.

I’m thinking of poetry: “I swear, that kiss, both lips utterly committed to the world, like a peace corps, like a free store, forever and always, a new city, no locks, no walls, just doors.” - Tim Seibels

The poet and philosopher David Whyte has a banner across the top of his website that says, “Poetry is language against which we have no defence.” I love that definition because, when it’s done well, that’s what makes poetry distinct: It reaches inside me and finds me utterly vulnerable and indefensible. It can be totally sincere and celebratory and not be about tension at all and I will welcome it, because I’m not necessarily looking for poems or paintings to grapple with me or change my mind.

But prose in essays is different. When essays are done well, they reach inside me with novel ideas, theories, concepts and distinctions that naturally invite me to want to agree or disagree with them.

And I think that’s the whole point. I want to read and write essays that challenge. I want to have my perception warped, my understanding of how things work and what they mean completely rearranged. The more rearranged, the better.

Like when my writing friend Tommy Dixon said, “It’s my job to continually teach the people in my life how to interact with me.” That was a paradigm shift.

Or when one of the tutors on Write of Passage, Wes Kao, said, “When you ask your recipient to pick around your [Calendly] schedule, you’re implicitly asserting a power dynamic.” I thought, “Holy shit, I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time!”

So, I need tension in order to write and, for me at least, gratitude on its own is not a helpful posture in the quest to say something worth saying.

This essay is a great example, in fact. The only way I was able to write what I’ve written here was by confronting the tension—embracing the tension—between what I hoped would happen in my little experiment and what actually happened in reality.

I suppose, in the end, I am grateful it didn’t go to plan.

“Hell is story friendly. But ... Paradise is not a story. Paradise is about what happens when the stories are over.” - Charles Baxter

I’m curious, are you a writer who uses gratitude? What have your experiences been like? Feel free to share in the comments, I’d like to chat to you about it.

See you next time,

Harrison

This was an essay attempting to offer guidance on how to use gratitude to help writers write. If you’re more interested in how to use the opposite posture—a posture of complaining—then you can read that one here →

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, Becky at

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, Lavinia at

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, Josh at

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for helping me with this.