Reading this post on The Pervocracy really got me thinking. The Pervocracy is generally not safe for work, but this post shouldn’t get you in any more trouble than you should be for reading blogs instead of, you know, working.  Click over and read it, it’ll open in a new tab and you can come right back.

All done? Really resonates, doesn’t it.

“Fear cuts deeper than swords”, is an axiom in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. There’s nothing like fear to get you to do something stupid. Decisions made while I was afraid have ruined my credit, cost me my car, far too much money, caused me to throw away good things and cling to bad, paralyzed me at the moment of action and spurred me into motion when stillness was called for.

It amazes me how we can make the same mistakes over and over.

For most of this year I’ve been living in a sort of low-grade Worst Thing In The World fear, only for me it’s reversed because the unknown, though scary, is far less terrifying to me than the status quo. I’m trying to make big changes and I really don’t know what I’m doing, but easily the scariest thought for me is that changes won’t happen and things will continue as they are.

Seems like that should make it easier, but of course it doesn’t work like that. I guess it’s always easier to make things worse than better, and thinking about that makes it easy to start second-guessing everything.

Today I reached the point where I had to screw up my courage to send a text message asking a friend to wish me luck. That probably means I’m approaching some second-guessing event horizon, past which no action is possible. A scary thought… but fear cuts deeper than swords.

This post feels awfully self-indulgent to me now that I look at it. But I’m going to publish it anyway, because I’ve had someone say they liked my more personal posts more than the ones where I’m just yelling at an asshole, and because I want to share that Pervocracy post as widely as possible, and because it’s my blog and I can write a whole post whining vaguely if I feel like it.