Fearless in Toronto writes about fear today — and I could sign my name on the bottom of the post.

There are so many — mostly unfounded — fears in my head. The main one is the one Fearless listed as last: “Maybe the real you just isn’t good enough”.

For I believe I have been given quite an amazing life. I moved to the town I always wanted to live and I bought a house there. It took me about 5 minutes to get the job — and, with all its temporary madness in the last 4 months, what an amazing job it proved to be. I’m (mostly) healthy, educated, for all my whining about money I am really well off, people left right and centre compliment my work, I am slowly forming a circle of friends, learning to cook, ride a bike (yes! three or four long-distance rides and I haven’t fallen even ONCE yet), I have a boyfriend (pending — but if I lose him, I know I won’t remain lonely for a long time, unless I want to; by now I could write a how-to guide to dating), I have an iphone, family and internet access.

And I am shit scared to lose all that.

Maybe they’ll discover I’m really quite an average designer with not much real talent.

Maybe nobody will ever want to read my writing.

Maybe I am making the wrong choices and putting myself on the straight path to being found five days after death, half-eaten by an Alsatian. (Just in case, I decided to never buy an Alsatian.)

Maybe I will always be the guy at the corner of the club who finally starts to feel comfortable the moment everybody else decides to leave. (Maybe I just need to learn to drink faster.)

Maybe I will always feel a struggle in my head between wanting to stand out of the crowd and at any price avoid becoming one of the identikit clone army, and between fearing that being different means being lonely and unloved.

Maybe the Moroccan boys on the street I live know I am gay and every day brings me closer to the moment they beat the shit out of me and I end up in hospital. (Growing up in Poland has a lot to answer for.)

All those things are, in a way, a possibility. Maybe somebody will gift me an Alsatian a day before Moroccan boys beat me up to steal my phone. Maybe nobody will ever read my writing at all, because the fear will stop me from, well, writing anything. Maybe I will lose my job at some point. All that is possible. It is possible that someone will break in to my house and set it on fire on the way out. It is possible that a piano will fall from a plane and kill me tomorrow.

Maybe the key is in the title of the book I read: “Feel the fear and do it anyway”. Because, yeah, avoiding life helps avoid unpleasant situations, but it also helps avoid pleasant ones; because, if — asked 10 times — you always say no to friends’ invites, they might stop asking you, and it is true that you may avoid getting killed by a flying piano by never leaving your home, but is that a life worth living?

I guess it’s good I’m back to therapy.