Fear
Will You Be Fearful or Fierce?
Overcome your fear and live a freer life.
Posted July 1, 2026 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- Identifying negative beliefs can help us overcome them.
- Past experiences don't need to hold us back from living our lives fully.
- Moving beyond the past can free us from fear and anxiety.
My mother raised me to fear traveling.
She told me that traveling was dangerous for a woman. She said that if I pulled my car into a rest stop, chances were high that I’d be raped, abducted and killed. I believed her.
My mother's fear was dogged, and so I adopted it. Yet, I didn’t want fear to drive my life.
Overcoming Negative Beliefs
In my thirties, I pushed my inherited worry of calamity to the curb and drove from where I lived in Boston to where my childhood friend’s memorial service was taking place in Manhattan because I didn’t want to miss it. Days before I left, I felt nauseous as I envisioned driving more than four hours by myself.
During the trip, I sat in my 1999 Honda Civic, my breath shallow as I drove in traffic and across bridges, my fingers tight around the steering wheel, my palms sweaty the entire way. This was before smart car technology and before GPS was a common app on cell phones; I held a traditional paper map on my lap with directions I’d penned and reinforced with a yellow highlighter in the side margins so that I could give a glance and know the next turn.
Against what I thought were the odds, I found my way and parked in an underground lot on the Upper East Side.
“You’ve surpassed me,” my mother spat into the phone when we spoke the next day. She told me my brother was traveling to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with her the following week and that I should not come.
The consequence of defying my mother’s fear wasn’t a cure for my anxiety, or hers; it was our estrangement.
To me, traveling was always riddled with trauma.
During my childhood, on our family vacations to the east end of Long Island, while my father drove our car, he watched me in the rearview mirror. On Old Montauk Highway, he accelerated up and down a stretch of steep hills as if we were at the beach riding the waves, only this was the road, not the ocean. With each tarred drop, my stomach fell, making me feel sick and sad and mad and scared.
When I asked my father to stop driving so fast, he laughed. I met his gaze in the mirror. His eyes were like bullets. He said, “Beg me.”
My mother sat in the passenger seat, her gaze out the side window, as if she were gone.
Please, I tried. Please stop. He didn’t stop until I cried or threw up.
Even after both my parents were dead, travel continued to pump my nervous system with anxiety.
Moving Beyond the Past
In my mid-40s, I doggedly overcame my anxiety.
I was partnerless when the pandemic began, and my desire for companionship trumped my travel fear. To adopt my dog, Beau, I had to drive across state lines. I didn’t know if I could go through with it, but I ventured anyway.
Adrenaline squeezed my stomach and chest, pushed into my throat, and traveled through my arms and legs, making my body tremble. I drove an hour-and-a-half to meet Beau. On our ride home, secured in the backseat with a harness and seatbelt, Beau began to cry, his tiny voice at first quiet, then louder, until he was trying to escape his confinement. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw myself as a child, trapped and at the whim of my sadistic father.
I pulled over and got into the backseat and held Beau, stroking his head until he grew calm and fell asleep.
For a while after his adoption, Beau would cry anytime we were in the car, his voice like an alarm. But eventually, he grew to love travel.
My mother’s ideas on the consequences of travel weren’t edicts, and they didn’t have to be my fate. They were anxiety-driven beliefs that I had the choice to keep or discard. I began to see the power in decision-making: I could narrow Beau’s world, as my mother had done to mine, or give him — and, in the process, myself — the tools to expand it.
Freedom From Fear
I discovered a far-off dog park so large you can’t see its boundaries from the entrance, a refuge of rolling hills and woodsy trails buffeted on three sides by a bay. Although the drive took 45 minutes to an hour each way and entailed traversing city streets, tunnels, bridges and highways, I took Beau there weekly. There, fear wasn't around. Beau galloped with other dogs, as if he were a freed horse, splashing through the water and across grassy fields, rolling on his back, in the mud, gazing up at the sky with a wide tongue-dangling smile, panting with pure joy.
Driving the long way home one day, my hands on the steering wheel, I became aware, for the first time, of the absence of my fear. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I saw Beau curled up in the backseat, sleeping.
Love, not fear, can take us anywhere. What can you doggedly overcome today?
This post contains excerpts adapted from a previously-published essay in Salon
