Episode
Confessions of a Scaredy-Cat
- Podcast
- Heretic Hereafter Podcast
- Published
- May 6, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 217
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://heretichereafter.substack.com/p/on-being-a-scaredy-cat
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Summary
Here’s the thing no one warns you about healing: once you stop numbing all your feelings and start facing yourself, you’ll be confronted with a lot of ugliness. You think you’re a nice person ? Look, here are all your petty resentments! Pretty sure you’re capable ? Here are all your failures and shortcomings! Think you’re rational ? Behold your bizarre late-night fears! I speak from personal experience. As I’ve worked towards mindfulness, I’ve noticed how much fear dominates my thinking. Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Here’s a shortlist of things that scare me: murderers, climate change, whether my kids will have economic opportunities, Manfluencers, military drones, my husband getting hit by a car while he’s cycling, AI replacing jobs, AI replacing MY job, school shootings, scary noises in the middle of the night, professional failure, war, raising sons who grow up to be Manfluencers, getting diabetes, raccoons, losing my kids on public transit, the US becoming a theocracy, my parents dying, losing the right to vote, my neighbors being harassed and/or deported, things never getting better. And, yeah, I probably shouldn’t be surprised; during my tenure in therapy, I received a litany of fear-related diagnoses: everything from post-partum anxiety to Generalized Anxiety Disorder, though those were before my eventual C-PTSD diagnosis, which made more sense of things. In the last 20 years, I’ve worked hard to tamp down my anxiety. So when mindfulness dredges up even more fear it suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. I just thought I was better , ya know? It’s so hard to know what a normal level of fear is. If I feel safe walking home by myself at night and my neighbor doesn’…