F
Fate - Fear
Fate
The silence was palpable the moment my mentor said it.
“God gave you a brain. Use it to its fullest extent before you ever refer to mystery.”
That moment, during the first week of my first class in my doctoral program, slammed the door on fate for me. There’s a tension between freedom and sadness in that. I lost a soft landing in difficult times, and gained some agency over my life and how I interacted with it.
It means that fate, however you frame it, has little power for me. It’s lost its theological and philosophical heft. If fate isn’t pulling the strings, responsibility and accountability are suddenly very real and very close.
I still long for moments when the fleeting comfort of surrender provide a salve in the face of unrelenting chaos. Yet, “meant to be” has been a calling card for too much abuse, oppression, and silencing of one another. The injustice of “that’s how it is” or “that’s how the world works” outweighs the comfort for me.
For me, if this world is going to be better, if a good life is going to be lived, it won’t be because fate finally did its job.
It’ll be because, whatever we believe about destiny or mystery, we still choose to participate, to respond, to repair. It’ll be because we stared down the injustice and said, “Not today.”
See: faith, freedom, agency, finitude, responsibility, meaning.
Fatigue
What does it for you? What is that moment, that relationship, that season, that unrelenting, in your face, degradation of energy that signals I’m done?
We’ve all encountered them, those immovable emotional, mental, and physical brick walls. The ones that we can’t just push through or circumnavigate. Sometimes they wear us down, eroding our protections and resilience. Other times they simply overwhelm us.
Fatigue is the result. It’s not a sleep-this-off or take-a-mental-health-day kind of exhaustion, but a bone-tired, can’t move kind of paralysis. We take in the world but can’t respond or react. We become numb, irritable, and hopeless, teetering on the edge of depression.
When fatigue sets in, it’s hard to get moving again. It’s hard enough when it’s episodic; imagine what it’s like when it’s chronic, when fatigue is the air we breathe rather than a bad week. Sometimes, it’s all we can do just to soften the impact, carve out some time for rest, or maybe say ‘no’ more than we used to.
I’d love to propose an easy answer, but this is a systemic issue, and systemic issues require systemic solutions. It needs workplaces, communities, families, governments, and cultures that don’t treat people like endless batteries.
In the meantime, most of us improvise. We look for small threads of hope on gray days, low-pressure spaces where we can unwind, or the courage to step away from something old or into something new.
There’s no one right solution. So when fatigue sets in, it may be more important to ask, “What is my body trying to teach me about my limits, my load, and what needs to change?”
See: burnout, rest, boundaries, trauma, nervous system, hope.
Feelings
Probably one of the most divisive words in psychology and culture. Feelings are subjective descriptions of the emotions we experience. They are entirely dependent on interpretation and thus differ entirely from person to person.
What we feel in any given moment is dependent on our vocabulary, history, and predictions about an experience. Some feelings are anticipatory, some reactive.
What we don’t often get, as human beings in relationships, is that all feelings are valid (because they are subjective). However, because we want certainty or uniformity or security, we have a habit of invalidating feelings that differ from our own.
I see this in clients who believe they “should” feel a certain way because that’s what others feel or tell them they ought to be feeling. I believe there is some human impulse to universally apply subjective experiences and then measure and compare compliance.
Let me put it to you as succinctly as possible… Stop It.
Stop trying to compare experiences; stop trying to deny how people feel; stop trying to impart your interpretation as the universally accepted one.
In short, if you want to tell someone how to feel, based on how you feel, then eff your feelings.
It’s hard enough to work through our history and interpretations without every Tom, Dick, and Mary telling us how we should or shouldn’t feel. Just shut up and listen. If someone tells you they feel a certain way, be quiet, or ask questions. Get curious, not certain. Find out what it means to them rather than “shoulding” all over their experience.
See: emotional regulation, embodiment, shame, empathy, communication, curiosity.
Fear
I’ve been wondering how you condense 300 pages into about 300 words. Fear is one of those basic emotions we all share. We’re afraid of different things, but the simple fact of the matter is that all of us experience fear.
Fear is different from anxiety in one major way. With fear we can name a threat. It’s an object in the environment that we interpret as potentially causing us harm.
When were afraid the blood drains to our extremities, our digestion slows or stops, and we prepare ourselves to react to the threat (fight, flight, freeze, appease). There’s a mechanism in our brain, the amygdala, that seems to help us identify and mark threats in the environment.
We all have this neuropsychological mechanism; therefore, we all feel fear. There is no such thing as being fearless. If someone tells you otherwise, walk away, they’re idiots (or at least uninformed).
However, we can train ourselves to create the pause necessary to respond with intention in moments when we feel threatened. A lot of this has to do with skill building around potential scenarios where threats abound. It also means exposing ourselves in limited ways to situations and experiences where risk is involved.
If we’re confident we can handle something, the threat abates somewhat. We’ll still get the rush, but we’ll confront and move through rather than move away from a threat.
See: anxiety, safety, trauma, courage, control, risk.