What would you do if you weren't afraid?

Spencer Johnson asked that in his thoughtful and clever (and unread by me) 1998 book Who Moved My Cheese?. But even the implications of that question frighten me. I've always been afraid, clutching my fear to me, afraid to lose what I'm so familiar with, even though it's mostly shaped my life for ill.

I've always been discouraged easily. I'll start or plan to do something and either get paralysis by analysis, or I tell folks I got depressed and just couldn't go on (back of hand to forehead as I gaze stoically into the distance). The depression part is true some of the time, but mostly I'm just afraid to change anything: being fat, being physically & emotionally disabled, being diabetic, being a host to several other diseases and disorders. It's what I'm used to.

I could change most of these things for the better by pursuing weight loss by way of the gastric bypass surgery I wrote about in the last post. But instead I dick around telling people I'm in an depressive episode and/or I'm trying to deal with more pain issues that usual. They're both true at the moment, but how am I to pursue the surgery to the end if I even balk at the beginning?

What would I do if I wasn't afraid? I might be thinner...many of my physical and emotional problems might be partly or fully resolved. I might be an author, a poet, a musician, a teacher. There's no telling what beauty might find expression through me, or what unfamiliar fears will come to challenge me. Perhaps I'll be strong enough then to face them fearlessly, learning what lessons they bring, and then moving past them.

What would I do if I wasn't afraid? I might probably, finally, be alive.