Do it Scared: A Long Walk, A Podcast, or Emotional Conversations

This is the companion post to Episode 3 of the podcast. If you haven't listened yet, head there first — then come back here for everything I was still thinking about after we stopped recording and in my listen back.

The phrase Do it Scared gets thrown around in self-help circles, it even looks good on a mug. Doing it scared in this context means feeling the fear, and pushing through, happily ever after. But that’s not quite what I mean. I mean something closer to what I texted my husband on day zero before I took a single step on the JMT, it simultaneously feels real and unreal, and I simultaneously feel calm and anxious. Both things at the same time; not one resolving into the other. Just both. I think that’s actually what doing it scared looks like for me–not a moment that fear transforms to confidence–the moment you go through with something anyways and you’re present for everything that brings. 

This isn’t something I’ve fully lived into until being on this side of the JMT. Sometimes it’s been easier to avoid whatever the thing is than to be present for everything it brings. 

But it’s something I’ve been living more into lately. The joy, the hard, the deepening of relationships, the struggle…the vulnerability (*cough* I think this is what I mean by everything it brings). That vulnerability is the thing to do scared. 

Through the process of doing this podcast, getting into the trail journal I never thought I’d share with anyone, I get vulnerable with Nikki. And what happened over the week we recorded the trail journal part of this podcast was magical because that vulnerability was returned. Another, new shared experience was created. Our friendship deepened. 

And I changed. While I have always been pro-vulnerability. I came to a new understanding that it’s okay to not wait for the right moment to say the scary thing. Sometimes you just say the scary thing that’s been living in your journal (or your mind). 

Since recording, I’ve been living more into Do it Scared than I ever had. And if I can leave you with one thing, it is that that thing, that hard, scary thing, is absolutely worth doing.