A.S. Thorne

What am I most worried about for the future?

Not being good enough is the easy answer. It’s the one I can say with a nervous laugh and brush off with a joke about being a perfectionist. But underneath that lives a deeper, more haunting truth:

I’m scared of being a failure.

Not just in one area of my life, but in all of them. As an author. An advocate. A wife. A human being. I’m terrified of waking up one day and realizing I gave everything I had, and it still wasn’t enough. That I never mattered. That nothing I did made a difference. That I was never truly seen.

This fear isn’t a fleeting worry. It lives in my body – a lump in my throat, a knot in my stomach. It’s the tension headache I carry like a crown, the perfectionism that demands too much and the depression that convinces me nothing matters anyway. It creeps in when I”m already stretched thin, when I’m juggling too much, when I’m too tired to fight back. It whispers to me in the quiet of night and the chaos of the day.

It’s always there. Lurking.

I thin it started in childhood. Somewhere between being the “good girl,” the people-pleaser, the one who wanted everyone to be proud. I remember trying so hard to be what others needed. To be liked. To be enough. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I wanted to be the one that made everyone proud. I wanted to prove that I was worth loving.

And that kind of fear – the fear of not measuring up – shapes everything.

When it shows up now, I freeze. It’s my trauma response. Emotional shutdown. Sometimes I go numb. Sometimes I overwork myself just to stay distracted from the noise in my head – the depression, the anxiety, the whisper that screams, “YOU’LL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH!” I used to self-sabotage, too. If I couldn’t succeed perfectly, I’d stop trying at all. I’m getting better. Slowly.

I’m learning. It’s not easy, and some days I still lose the battle. But I’ve made progress. I’m practicing self-acceptance, speaking to myself with more kindness. I’m learning to breathe in the quiet instead of fearing it. I’m learning that it’s okay to be a work in progress.

A big part of healing? The people I have around me now. The ones who cheer me on when I can’t cheer for myself. The ones who sit with me when I want to give up. The ones who remind me that trying is enough.

And courage. That words means everything to me right now. Not the absence of fear, but choosing to try anyway. Courage is what I find in the smallest of moments: getting out of bed, sending the email, writing the page, showing up even when I want to disappear. Fear still screams sometimes, but I’m learning to walk beside it instead of letting it lead.

Maybe fear won’t ever leave. But I’m learning to accept it. To live with it. To love myself, even when the fear is loud. Maybe healing isn’t about erasing the fear – it’s about finding the courage to keep going anyway.

So if you’re reading this and your fear is screaming too, I want to challenge you:

Keep going.

Find the courage to try, even when you don’t believe in yourself yet. Be your biggest cheerleader. And when you can’t? That’s okay too. Find your people. Your lifelines. The ones who remind you how to stand when you’re too tired to rise on your own.

You are not a failure. You are still becoming.

And that is more than enough.

<3 A.S. Thorne