Having fears is rather helpful. If you fear crossing a motorway after spinning around a beer bottle 20 times, then you’d better listen to it when it tells you…DON’T!
Fears are good. Fears keep us from doing harm to ourselves, and preferably others as well. The trick is to see the difference between fears that keep us alive and fears that keep us from living. The latter are the ones on my “Pinching the Ostrich” hitlist. That list sums up 10 personal fears of mine. Some of them are seemingly trivial things, although not so trivial from my perspective. And every six months into the Pinching the Ostrich journey, I seek to overcome one of them by confronting it and embracing it entirely. (see: "Overcome Anything" on the main website)

Fears have this pretty neat defence system. They somehow seem to know they live by the grace of us acknowledging them as do-gooders, friends with nothing but good intentions, palls that care for us, even if that could not be any further from the truth. Regardless how inconveniently they interrupt us from moving forward in life, they do it out of love for us. They know what’s best for us, undoubtedly. Even if we pay the price of denying ourselves that (re)new(ed) relationship, that job that should be rightfully ours, that dream being accomplished, that idea being put into action, that once in a lifetime opportunity…because that is what good friends do, right? Or do they? Well, my fears list are a party of 10 so-called friends I have decided I can do without, and number one is about to be handed his hat. So here it goes:

I have an underbite. My lower front teeth are placed in front of my upper front teeth when my mouth is shut, which – granted - doesn’t happen all that often, but still. It’s not that I risk drowning when caught in a sudden downpour, but the faulty positioning of my teeth have created an unbalanced position of my jaw. Although it’s not really apparent which is cause and which is effect, the result is the same: an underbite, which requires corrective surgery.

Here’s an x-ray shot of the problem.

You can see my lower teeth standing in front of the upper ones. You can see the dental fillings that are caused by the extra stress my unbalanced bite has caused over the years, and you can see two weird circles in the middle of my skull. Those aren’t iPod ear plugs, those were just two plastic thingies keeping my head in place while making the x-ray.

To cut a long story short, on July 8th I will start to wear braces for about one year after which my upper jaw will be surgically detached from my skull, placed forward ever so slightly and reattached. 6 Weeks later I should be up to my old tricks again.

Do I look forward to be orally wireframed? Nope. Do I have a bizarre masochistic tendency, which makes me go surgically medieval on myself? Not that I am aware off. But as much as I’m not looking forward to the practicalities of this venture, they aren’t even what this fear is all about. Then what is, I see your raised eyebrow asking me.

My underbite has been part of my life and in a real sense, my personality for the last 25 years. It has partially defined me – or better said – I allowed it to define me in ways that weren’t always very helpful. There was even one time when I didn’t want people to look at my profile, which is a pretty challenging thing in a crowd. I let it undermine my sense of self-worth and self-esteem for many years, but it never seemed to be the proper time to do something about it. I had exams coming up, I was cast in a play, I had a newly born in the house…
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That seemingly rational conversation you have with yourself which always boils down to pushing something forward in time. It’s never a good time to deal with it. After all, you have a mortgage to pay, you just started that new job, the kids haven’t left the house, there’s not enough money in the bank, it’s not all that important anyway, etc, etc, etc.
The trouble with this pushing things forward in time is that it accumulates loads of unnecessary garbage along the way, so the thing you just keep postponing gathers more and more weight, importance and requires more and more energy to keep it moving. After all this time, it has become so big and massive that you’re left with two option: You stop pushing and stop moving forward all together, or you deal with it and all the excess luggage it picked up along the way.

I’m going for the latter and quite frankly, it scares me so much that I have sweat coming out of pores I never knew I had, just talking about it. But I am talking about it, which is something I couldn’t even imagine 6 months ago.

With the braces coming on this Wednesday, I will be creating a point of no return, both for the surgery one year later and putting an end to a quarter century of procrastination.

But what has this to do with creativity? Everything! Believing in yourself, stepping out of your comfort zone, putting deeply rooted wishes into concrete action, dealing with your own disbeliefs, the list goes on.

I for one need to, and want to know what lies beyond Wednesday.

Take care,
Karl

Share

« Back