I’ve got a special place in my heart for Soul Cycle. It’s not because of their kickass playlists, or how it’s a beastly enough workout to make you feel like you’re set for the week– though those perks are certainly up there. No, babe-raham-lincolns, Soul-Cycle has a special place in my heart because of what a game changer the mid-workout shouts of affirmation can be when, especially when I’m nose-to-nose with fear. It all started with a particular workout.
I was newly single, having ended a relationship of three and a half years. When it comes to healing matters of the human heart, there’s no easy fix. Yes it takes time, and it also takes a village. And within that village spring up unlikely allies. Allies who don’t even know they’re serving as your allies. Unsuspecting allies like a stranger with gentle eyes on the bus giving you a smile when they don’t know you need it. Unsuspecting allies like your favorite podcaster cosmically choosing the very topic you needed to hear that week. Unsuspecting allies like a spin instructor at Soul Cycle who has no idea who you are among the masses but knows the power of positivity and the great distance it can go.
I was terrified of starting over. I was terrified of the unknown. I was afraid of not having a clear sense of what my routine would be in the short-or-long term future. I was afraid of testing my ability to cultivate a healthy, kickass, stronger-than-ever relationship with myself. I was afraid of “what it means” to move back home at the age of 3o and having to place a particular story on the bookshelf of life that I didn’t think would have that ending. I was afraid of what the breakup meant in terms of my “timeline.” I was bobbing and weaving between all these fears at the onset of the academic year, coupled with the professionally-daunting task of finishing my masters at the same time.
If you’ve perused some of my articles about fear (or read my “Brief Philosophy of Fear,”) you may be familiar with my perspective that personal journeys involving fear have a beginning and a middle, but not necessarily an end, because fear isn’t something that we eradicate from ourselves or our lives. Rather, it’s a perfectly-normal human emotion & natural instinct that we learn to interact with, and re-direct for periods of time when it’s interfering. Fear doesn’t “poof! disappear,” but we can equip ourselves with the tools and perspectives and muscle memory to better manage it when it starts to obstruct the experiences we’ve set our eyes on. And, just like every other human being in the world, just because I’ve managed fear and self-doubt in the past, doesn’t mean it won’t crane its neck around the corner again in a giraffe-like manner. And sure enough, in Fall of 2018, there it was once again, as if the fates had seen my breakup, looked at Fear, and had been like “yo Fear, you’re up.”
When I was sitting on my assigned indoor bike-that-goes-nowhere, and opening myself up to the turbo-charged positive vibes of the spin instructor, I realized all of a sudden how much I realized the affirmation. I realized that I needed to start paying attention to something that I hadn’t given much TLC to in quite some time : the ever-strengthening inner voice. The ever-strengthening inner voice is the narrative that plays inside your head during your waking hours. The voice that says “you got this.” The voice that says “You’re strong, you can handle this.” The voice that says “That project is worth pursuing” Of course there are all kinds of internal narratives: we can have chip-on-our-shoulder ones, “the world is against me,” ones, “I’m not doing this right,” ones, but in order to move past self-doubt and nudge fear aside across all contexts, we have to make a commitment to the ever-strengthening inner voice. We need it to keep us going. We need it to remind us that we can and we will.
So here’s how it starts:
don’t put the pressure on yourself to build it single-handedly.
You have every reason and right to rely on nuggets of inspiration from others, from your posse, from the outside world, from your surroundings first. You do not, I repeat do not, have to feel like the “strong thing to do is to (wo)man up and take care of your own pep talks” I mean, that’s a lot of pressure to put on someone who already feels overwhelmed, amirite?
What you do need to do is allow yourself to believe people when they say “you got this,” and actively internalize it.
You have to welcome others’ confidence in you into your heart, or the upward climb will keep feeling Sisyphean. Once you start collecting these kernels of “you are invincible,” you can make your comeback and say to yourself “okay I’m ready to take the reigns now” and continue to build that inner voice, with more panache than you likely envisioned possible. But for starters, it wouldn’t be fair to yourself to expect it to just be readily-available out of nowhere when you’re feeling downtrodden or intimidated by a set of circumstances.
So, that one day last fall, when I was at Soul Cycle and the energetic-AF spin instructor was saying “”YOU ARE A BADASS” to a class full of people bouncing up and down on their stationery bikes while an astonishingly-loud club remix of The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” was playing, ” I chose a different reaction than my default one. Historically I was all about the “K great but why am I sweating so hard that I look like I jumped in a pool?” But that day I chose to focus on the message of encouragement and internalize it. Because my inner voice NEEDED it. And it still does, all the time, no matter how King of world I’m feeling from a scale of 1 to Jack Dawson.
So the next time you need a little boost– or even if you’re fine sans boost, when someone says you are a badass, take their word for it. Because you absolutely are, and your ever-strengthening inner voice will thank you for the reminder.