The Big Lie

Courage is an illusion.

Look around. It’s easy to spot someone who is braver, bolder, brassier than you. But are they, really?

Am I, really?

Sure, I look it from the outside. I strut onto the stage to spread my message to millions, undaunted, as if I know what the hell I’m doing. (I don’t.) I speak and write with raw, reckless emotions as if I don’t have a care in the world what people will think of me. (I do.) I broadcast live on social media as if my red, chemo-cream, pock-marked face isn’t terrifying small children. (It is.)

And I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all of your kind text messages and virtual hugs and social distant cheers of late. Every single one of them has meant the world to me. Each of you has been a lighthouse in a dark storm, and I am forever grateful.

But, I feel compelled to tell you the truth:

I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, and I’m making it all up — and always have been — at work and at home. Every single big, every single moment.

At work, I’m riddled with insecurities about putting out an online offering — thanks COVID — of my wildly popular Limitless keynote that goes kerplunk with the sound of a thousand failures dropping of forty stories into the abyss of “meh.” (I mean, if an e-course falls in the forest and no one is there to sit through your free webinar and get subscribed into your sales funnel, did the e-course ever even fall at all?!?)

At home, I’m terrified to say the wrong thing as I navigate the treacherous fire swamp that is every conversation with any teenager ever, lest they clam up and disappear into their devices until their next feeding. (Luckily, they are in the throes of puberty — yay — so those feedings happen every 2–3 hours like clockwork. Ready? Restart!)

And in the spaces in between with friends and family, it’s all just one giant shit show of forgetting to defrost dinner, send the birthday card, give the dog her pills — oh, damn, be right back… (But, hey, thanks again COVID, at least now I’m not forgetting to pick my kids up from school.)

But what about you? Do you have courage? Or are you, too, making it up as you go along?

I think we mistakenly ascribe courage to courageous acts, in hindsight, when the enemy is dispatched and the coast is clear. We pronounce that someone is courageous because they did something that was courageous. But, most courageous acts don’t come from a place of undaunted strutting and bold, brassy, bravado. Most of them come from having no other choice.

Going live to my tribe in the midst of a chemotherapy treatment doesn’t make me courageous. Inspirational? Sure, I’ll take that if I must. But courage is the Mothers of the Movement, Black Lives Matter, protesters in the streets knowing that tear gas and beatings are possible even when the words and actions are peaceable. It’s the members of our armed services who go into battle with an often unseen enemy because freedom is not and never was free. It’s the women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ candidates who, in this world of certain social media pillorying, still knowingly put themselves out there to run for office because they can no longer sit on the sidelines.

We are courageous often not because we are replete with courage, but because we are no longer (or never were) replete with remaining options.

You are scared. I am scared. They were (and are) scared.

But they did the damned thing anyway.

Courage isn’t that absence of fear. It’s feeling the fear and going forward anyway.

For me, I could not do the work I do, I could hide in the dark, I could curl up in a ball in fetal position and rock back and forth until the nest is empty. But I don’t. That way lies boredom, jealousy, death.

So I do the work. I fuck up. I fall down. And I press forward, not because I am courageous, but because I’m scared shitless of the alternative.

And, somewhere in that journey, I learn that I have the courage to do what I must.