Note #62: Facing your fears

Hot sauce and dead dragons, core values and jam

What’s up?

So it’s been a few crazy weeks recently, and I’m loving it!

Because, guess who’s prepping for MRCPsych and also being a writing mentor in the seventh cohort of Write of Passage on top of everyday work? Yep. This guy right here. I mean, it’s a lot, but I also really wanted to do both things, and I figured I could make it work. So far, so good.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news, I’ve been really enjoying adding hot sauce to my lunches at work when I eat at the canteen. And like I note in the tweet below, it’s also a reminder of my dear dear grandmother, to whom I owe my taste for pepper.

Dọ́kítà Ayọ̀mídé @DocAyomide

I’m happy to report that lunches at the work canteen have hereby been upgraded. Also this is a pocket (literally!) memory of my dear late grandma, who gave me my taste for pepper. Hot sauce in my bag, baby.

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Essay

This week, I wrote about how I faced a longstanding fear to get started writing. It’s in the spirit of my current mentoring with Write of Passage, but I hope you find it a helpful reminder of how much it means to face any fear at all—and which of us hasn’t had to?

Enjoy the opening paragraphs:

The first story I remember writing was about children who had spent all their lives in a castle, hemmed in not by the walls, but by the terrible knowledge that on the other side waited a deadly dragon.

The story was my first serious attempt at writing and it only took me until my first year in university. It was, of course, a thinly-veiled metaphor for my longstanding fear of writing: something I’d wanted to do since starting secondary school. A couple other friends and I had got caught up in the idea of working on a novel together, but we never got as far as planning out a story.

But I always thought about it…

You can read the rest of the essay here: Fear is a dead dragon

Quote

Speaking of fear, I love this framing of what our core values are: what are we willing to face consequences for?

You know what really matters to people, and to yourself, when you see what they (or you) are prepared to put take consequences for rather than compromise. It’s not a lack of fear, but a prioritisation of something else even more.

Spreading jam (French proverb)

Today, we’re switching from Yoruba proverbs to a French one I got from a friend:

Like jam the less we have the more we spread it.

Talk soon,

Doc Ayomide

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