The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Fear of the Dark
I’ve always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude,
and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my
children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close
to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I’d picture something
terrible happening; I’d picture losing everything in a flash.
At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I
started working on it, I realized that “my too good to be true” was totally related to fear, scarcity, and
vulnerability. Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage to talk
about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come to one of my parenting
lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed
in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to
her.
You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I’m crazy and now they’re all sitting there

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like, “She’s a nut. How do we get out of here?” Then all of the sudden I heard the sound of a woman
toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone
from the front shouting out, “Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?” The auditorium
erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone.
Most of us have experienced being on the edge of joy only to be overcome by vulnerability and
thrown into fear. Until we can tolerate vulnerability and transform it into gratitude, intense feelings of
love will often bring up the fear of loss. If I had to sum up what I’ve learned about fear and joy, this is
what I would say:
The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It’s our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.