“The Day I Decided to Wake up Fearless…”

By Vanessa D. Nesbit

“Speaking to demons is never easy…” It’s never the kind of thing that you do while being conscious of the reality that you stand on the fringe of reality, interacting with both what is “real” in your present and that-which-will-come-after you’ve said what you had to say about yourself and your current situation. “Speaking to demons” is even more difficult when they reside inside, and belong to, YOU...

The day I woke up and decided to be fearless, I don’t believe I was convinced my decision would mean anything, really. I think I just thought it would be another day, a day in which I would do what I always did. When I awoke, I would pull back the same covers. I would see the same people. I would go to the same bathroom, with the same old wallpaper print, and grab the same toothbrush that I had purchased since my last dental appointment. I would prepare to go to the same job, and more repetition would ensue. In short, I was “at one” with the idea of being the guy in “Groundhog Day.”

Now, anyone who knows anything about film history knows what I’m talking about here: Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, 1993. A guy wakes up one Groundhog Day expecting the same routine, but instead learns a lesson he’ll never forget about what real monotony is. He begins waking up to the same day over and over again, encountering the same people (basically) each time and quickly realizes that something is wrong. More wrong than he had originally felt about his life, filled with its daily mishaps, insults, and murderous boredom. (I’ll interject here that I would suspect that Murray’s character was alarmed (to say the very least), and must’ve hyperventilated on more than one occasion upon finding that he was trapped in his own life. It must’ve felt as though the walls were closing in on him (sound familiar?)…)

That is until he gets the notion that if he dared to do something differently, he would experience a different outcome. His original, really crappy day begins to show real “promise” for being something more substantial with each passing, repeat Groundhog Day. It is important to note, at this point, that the impetus for these changes lay in the initial meeting with the new station producer (Andie MacDowell) whom he doubts he would ever be able to “get with” in a million years. But in the end, it is when he decides to take a chance, to care enough about his own life to TRY to do something about how he felt about MacDowell’s character and his own low self-esteem (crappy job as a weatherman for a local tv station), that he dares to break the drudgery in his life. And by so doing, he becomes “fearless.” Great movie.

I can’t recall a particular date or time when it happened to me – that I became “fearless” – but it was something I never thought of myself as being capable of doing. Maybe the process began cognitively the time when I was in middle school and had been dodging this big, girl - more like, Amazon woman! - (and yes, she was black) for weeks (yes, I am embarrassed to say, I literally, RAN from her) until I simply wore myself out and, facing her squarely, I told her that I wasn’t running anymore. I was simply tired of running, and, well, she would just have to do whatever it was she planned on doing to me. (And hopefully, I prayed, quickly! And hopefully it wouldn’t involve any torture techniques that hurt too much…Incidentally, in the end, all turned out less dramatically than I imagined...)

Or perhaps it was the process of me having cried my eyes out those nights when, as a child, my parents financially struggling, my younger sister and I wondered if Mommy and Daddy would be getting a divorce because they fought so much. Or maybe it was after I packed up my life, after growing up in a familiar, urban neighborhood in Queens, NY, and moved with my parents and younger sibling to live in the basement of my older brother’s house in Delaware because we had to do something different (code for “we needed to find a new landlord (rather landlady)”…Perhaps it was after I stopped remembering to be ashamed of the fact that we were not the upper middle class family that I thought we were. When I experienced my first rejection of the man I thought might love me…Or when I quit my full-time job (which I had worked so hard to keep in order to pay the rent for my family and I) to do my final year of college during the daytime hours, since I had exhausted all of the classes that convened at night.

No, I doubt that one can really prepare his or her self for the act of becoming “fearless” since in order to do this, one must first know what he or she is afraid of (and there are oh, so very many things to be afraid of…). But there is something to be said for experiencing those small victories, where you wake up and you realize that, yes, your toothbrush will still be there in the toothbrush holder, next to your rinse cup, but when you go to work, the office bullies don’t have to experience the same success provoking you and forcing you to perform at less-than-your full potential for fear that YOU will get the promotion that he or she had always wanted but lacked the motivation to prepare for – or to “earn.” When you hear the words - that always seem to hold the same weight as conversations in, and of, their own selves - “cancer” and “remission,” you no longer freeze up and miss the rest of the conversation. The prospect of keeping a relationship that has never worked - and will never work - then becomes “different,” because you are no longer afraid of what people will say or think if you reply that you haven’t had a man in your life in I-don’t-know-how-long. You start that business, or go for that job you’re not quite sure you’re qualified for. You submit that manuscript that you’re uncertain as to whether you are talented enough to submit for publication…

Although, as with anything, your past actions (imperfect though they may be) have brought you to this point, you also realize that your past does not have to direct all aspects of your future: it just made you into who you are now, at present. What you do from here, lies completely in your hands…Because it all begins with a decision to wake up. And then to make another decision. And good or bad, to make yet another decision.

And hopefully, as you go along, you make decisions like Murray did in “Groundhog Day:” the type of decisions that make you feel good about waking up and maybe still not knowing all that the day holds. But these decisions give you Hope. And celebrate Love. And it is only at this point that one knows that a morning has come and gone in which you’ve made the conscious decision to wake up “FEARLESS.”