Brave Not Brave

I don’t think I am brave, though people tell me I am. Too often I fail to act. When gripped with fear; I balk. My doing something you are afraid of doesn’t make me brave. Doing something I’m afraid of does, and every time I do it takes every ounce of strength I have. Bravery requires consideration otherwise it’s impulse, and impulse isn’t the same as brave. Bravery is acknowledging you’re terrified but taking action anyway.  If you saw the movie We Bought a Zoo, you probably remember this:

Being brave has always comes at great personal cost to me, and probably appears more foolhardy than brave. The times I’ve shown courage I took an action that I knew would be difficult, affect other people and take most of my energy. I thought long and hard before I acted. Each time I was willing to take that risk it has catapulted me into some of the darkest moments of my life, and I have had to work hard to get back to the light. Given the chance I’d do them all again because I have never regretted them, or not much.

For me, bravery has always involved leaving and in every single instance what I felt wasn’t brave, it was a sense of failure and shame. Walking into the lion’s den was never as scary as walking out. The bravery was in leaving anyway, in my willingness to admit defeat, and face that failure. When I was a freshman in college it didn’t take long to realize I was in the wrong place. I was plagued by nightmares, as I struggled to fit in, while trying to figure a way out. Telling my parents required all the courage I could muster.

Leaving Skidmore College was the dress rehearsal for the other departures I’d make later. I left two rotten, long-term relationships one involved a jointly owned business, the other a child, both a home and shared friends. I left a job that gave me financial security but had turned my life into a misery. Each time I agonized over the decision. I’d second guess and berate myself for making another bad choice, screw up all the courage I had and leap, but not before I had to have a difficult and scary conversation with someone I didn’t want to confront.

Those were my bravest moments. I never lifted a car off a loved one’s body, jumped out of a plane or faced an actual lion. Once I jumped (not dove) from the high diving board, and though my stomach felt as if it was filled with a thousand angry butterflies, it was nothing compared to telling someone who thought I’d be with them forever that I would not. It was easy compared to saying out loud to a man I detested that I could no longer do my job or meet his expectations. I rehearsed each of those conversations over and over, as I tried to imagine what life would look like on the other side. Reality was always worse than I imagined. 

Leaving a job, a relationship or a marriage are the sorts of things people do every day. My doing them wasn’t especially brave, and certainly not heroic. Still I know from watching other people endure just those things how hard they are to do. I see other peoples’ struggles and then I recognize my own. At the time I was going through those very things I wouldn’t have called what I was doing brave. I felt like a coward. The people who were impacted called me reckless and impulsive. They had no idea how long I’d struggled to make the final decision.

Impulse is not bravery, though it often masquerades as such. It is the opposite of courage. It is (at least in my case) a response to fear, insecurity, or just plain panic. The problem I run into is I don’t plan for those twenty seconds well. I am rarely impulsive, so when I am it generally backfires. It comes on suddenly and I feel compelled to act. I can’t stop myself. Impulse costs me as well, but there are rarely any rewards. Bravery takes more than a split second, it takes time to assess a situation, think about your options and then act despite everything holding you back. It takes insane courage.