When You Feel Scared and Hopeless

This is a love letter for when you feel like giving up. 

When your inadequacies, fears, and hopelessness feel so big that you don't know how to move forward and you don't know how to feel better, read this letter and know that you’re okay.

Feeling scared and hopeless is normal

Yes, your feelings are normal. As a human being, you are meant to feel the full spectrum of human emotion, and hopelessness and fear are on that spectrum. Feeling negative emotions doesn't make you bad or wrong. You’re having a feeling right now, in this moment. And every human has felt that way at one time or another. 

This is what it means to be human.

Your brain isn’t going to help

Our human brains are amazing tools for many, many things, but they don’t know how to look on the bright side. 

The brain is wired to focus on the negative in order to protect us from it. 

When you’re a human with negative emotions and a critical human brain, of course you’re going to feel like you’re failing. But you are not your thoughts. You don’t have to believe the thoughts of failure that your brain will offer you when you feel scared and hopeless. 

Remember that you’re a beginner human

It doesn’t matter how old you are, you’re still a beginner – because you’ve never done human life before. This is your first shot! Stop expecting yourself to be so good at it, and focus on the fact that you’re learning. We’re all here to figure things out. We all feel like we’re in over our heads. That doesn’t mean we just give up. 

It means we give ourselves space and time to practice, learn, fail, and try again.

You’ll Learn:

• The one thing that causes us the most unnecessary pain
• Two tools to use when you feel especially afraid of failure
• What your brain is actually most scared of (it’s not what you think)
• How you’re capable of feeling every feeling you create without making it a problem