Courage Comes With Practice

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I believe in mystery.

I believe in family.

I believe in being who I am.

I believe in the power of failure,

and I believe normal life is extraordinary.

This I Believe.

Fear can be irrational or can be justify, but it’s hard to overcome and often hard to talk about it. Our “this I believe” essay today comes from Theresa MacPhail, she is a medical /anthropologist/ at /UC verkly/. And she does fail to work in China, specialized in bird flue. Her work requires a certain amount of courage, a quality sustained by her believe. Here is our series curator independent producer Jay Allison.

Theresa MacPhail said that most people would never know that she was a nervous person. // She rarely tells people about some of the things she wrote off in this essay and was little afraid to speak of them which is why she did it. Here is Theresa MacPhail with her essay for this “I believe”.

I believe that embracing fear produces courage. After my brother die in an accident, my mother was inconsolable, I was only four years old at the time. But I still understand the sighs make a shift in my mum’s attitude to word --safety. Suddenly, everything around us is potentially dangerous, overnight, the world has gone from a playground to a hazard song. I grow up with a lot of restrictions and rules that remind to protect me. I couldn’t walk from school by myself, even when everyone I knew already did. I couldn’t attend the drama parties and go to summer camp, because what if something happened to me.

As I get older, the list of things to fear get longer. My entire life is divided into things you should avoid and things you need to do in order to have a good long life. I know my mum is only trying to protect me, she worried about me, because after my brother died, I was her only child. And what if something happens to me, what if. I became a natural worrier, I worry about things like getting cancer, losing my wallet, car accidents, earthquakes, have a brain aneurism, losing my job, and my plane crashing, disasters, big and small, real and imaginative, the final part is you never know it by looking at my life. Because I constantly force myself to do the things that frighten or worry me. In fact I develop a rule for myself, if it scares me , then I have to do it at least once. I’ve done lots of things that my mum would have worried about. I’ve ridden a motorcycle, I’ve travelled a lot. In fact, I’ve lived in China, I’ve performed standard of comedy, and I am planning my second wedding. I still travel to China often, tracing bird flue as a medical /antipologist/. The something else I don’t usually talk about but it is in the corner // of my believe. When I was fourteen, my mother died suddenly in a car accident, that lost on top of my brother’s unnatural death could paralyze me. But at my mum’s funeral, I remember making a choice, I could either live up rest of my life trying to be safe, or I could be brave enough to live out of fear feeling, exciting, and yes, sometimes’ dangerous in life. I worry that I may betray my mother by riding a battle and slave. But she has been driving force my life and at the end, I think she has bankrupted me.

Courage isn’t a natural attribute of human beings. I believe that we have to practice being courageous, using courage is like developing a muscle. The more often I do things that scare me and make me uncomfortable, the more I realize that I can do a lot more than I originally though I can do. Even know // in my mother’s unconscious nature, I’ve also come to believe that fear can be a good thing if we face it. Believing in that has made my world a less scary place.

Theresa MacPhail with her essay for this “I believe”, MacPhail said her family story sometimes feels like a movie with a plight you can’t believe. In fact, her father also died in accidental death. But she keeps telling herself lightening more strike for times in the road and refuses to live in fear. We hope your consider telling us of your believe. Find out more and see all the essays at series at NPR.org.

For this I believe, I’m Jay Allison. Support for this I believe comes from prudential retirement. This I believe is independently produced by Jay Allison and Dan Getmen, John Geregry and Viky Marik. There is this I believe journal and day planner may help you write you own statement of believe. It’s valuable for NPR shop at npr.org/thisibelive.