Sarah takes a sip of coffee, takes a deep breath, and begins. She’d decided she just had to speak up in a room that contained a number of radical conservatives, she explains, and she’d been dreading it, especially because she already felt like they didn’t take her seriously. But she held her head high, and when her opening came, she took it. At first her voice trembled, but then she rose to her full height and her diaphragm expanded as she shared her perspective, focusing especially on threats to human rights. The most difficult people in the room were, as expected, defensive and dismissive, but Sarah persisted. And it wasn’t the expected nastiness of the worst ones that stung her most, she says, but the silence of others while she was criticized for taking a position she knew several of them agreed with. “It was painful when they abandoned me,” she said. And then Sarah started to doubt and wonder: Had she perhaps actually been out of line? Was she a trouble-maker and a loudmouth? This experience bled into previous memories of speaking up in shaming, invalidating spaces. Was she too loud? Too opinionated? Too focused on the “problems of others”? Each time she recalls these experiences, she relives the self-doubt, fear and anger, uncertain if speaking up is even worth it.
I have my own recollections of struggling to push past such fear, to find my voice and my bearings, when it has seemed imperative to do so. In fact, I think that some such deeply embedded memories help form the fabric on which whole sections of my personality and sense of self have been embroidered. For instance, I can easily recall how my legs trembled as I took the stage to speak at my high school graduation, and even my first hesitant steps into kindergarten. I can recreate the gnawing dread of speaking at the funeral of a friend, at job interviews and more. And none of this is yet even to mention the potentially conflictive or wrenching social and political experiences at our doorsteps now: of speaking up and acting out against the rising tide of authoritarian injustice and atrocity. While many of us often manage to do what we think necessary and right, we may find ourselves forced to rely on little tricks to help us ignore, paper over, or brute force our way past a thumping heart, or stabbing sensations of anxiety. Indeed, most of us probably know first hand how necessary substances, distraction, and self-talk can feel when it comes to walking into a scary room, writing that protest letter, or joining that picket line.
Many of all of us have also exploited the ego’s favored technique for dealing with fear and vulnerability: to aggrandize ourselves out of it, that is, to fall more deeply into the arms of our personality. This strategy, which may be employed by our most well-meaning supporters, is rooted in bravado. It’s reflected in much of the “rah! rah! You’ve-got-this!” discourse that can be heard everywhere from children’s sporting events to therapists’ offices to ICUs to yoga studios. It’s a method based on cultivating and strengthening an internal voice that chearleads us into believing how awesome we are, how brave and special, a voice assuring us of our rightness and merit. This voice showers us with affirmations of our moral rectitude and our intelligence, while maybe also adding commentary about others such as: “How dare they!” and “Who does he think he is?!” When we’re in circumstances in which we feel collective moral outrage, or that we have been personally wronged, this is the internal voice that scrambles to convince us of two key things: One, that we are being victimized by those “others,” and so have a right and responsibility to react, perhaps even to retaliate. And, two, that we are somehow better than those others: more intelligent, knowledgeable, sensitive, insightful, and on and on.
Of course, this superficial version of “courage” may lead to relative success—no doubt, many battles on behalf of the innocent and deserving have been fought by ego-driven warriors—but, for many of us, it comes to be revealed as unreliable, shallow, and ultimately unsatisfying. This is partly because, when our courage is rooted in such sandy soil, we are likely to walk away second guessing ourselves and maybe even feeling shame. Whether we were, in fact, right or wrong may not matter much at that point because the same ego that propelled us through our fear may now shift into its litany of self-doubt. Even if we have “won,” then, we may emerge from the battle with ongoing self-talk of how wronged we were, replaying the scene over and over again, and finding new reasons to be outraged. Increasingly, we may feel victimized not only by the obvious “bad guy” but also by the others who were “supposed to” stand beside us and did not. The ego’s need for validation is indiscriminate after all. It demands attention and affirmation of some sort from both supposed enemies and friends. One of the surest signs that our courage has been rooted in ego is the inability to let things go, to need to continue replaying the scene, to squeeze out more juice to feed our outrage.
This is not to say that it’s “wrong” to feel righteous indignation or to be angry with, or disappointed by, those who abuse or betray us, other people, our nation and our planet. We are human animals after all and these are quintessentially human reactions. It simply cannot be—can it?—that the capacity for deep human emotion is an error, an interloper to be banished, a stain to be bleached away. In fact, wouldn’t it be strange if we did not feel such emotional reactions when we interpret ourselves, our human family, or our ideals as having been wronged or threatened? Indeed, such human reactions can provide motivation to act—including on behalf of our individual and collective survival—as well as critical psychological and ethical clues to us about ourselves, about what we value or what frightens us. But while many will be satisfied with the ego’s approach to fear and courage—and spend a lifetime being tossed around by the attendant emotions (be they positive or negative)—many who bother to read this essay are interested in additional possibilities. And the good news is that we need not rely solely on the ego’s shallow offerings in order to fulfill our social, professional, and personal goals and obligations.
From an egoic point of view, courage is little more than a technique, an almost mechanical means of pushing through or past our own fears in order to accomplish a goal. And so it’s often about psyching oneself up (or out), adopting the appropriate role, uniform, and accoutrements, figuratively if not literally: the political t-shirt and protest sign, the expensive suit or doctor’s coat. Our ego’s idea of being brave is often primarily about becoming someone else, at least for a little while, someone capable of doing this very hard thing that we, ourselves, may not feel able to do. In this fake-it-til-we-make-it game, performance is all and bravado is key. But that the word “courage” is rooted in the Latin “heart” is both evocative and apt and points to a richer possibilities: “Take heart,” we may say, and we can feel that as encouragement to become more rooted in the center of who we truly, vulnerably are, not less so. To be brave in this richer sense is to descend more firmly into the wholeness of one’s own integrity, far beyond personality-level descriptors such as “firebrand,” “wallflower” or “straight-shooter,” far deeper than roles such as “activist,” “hero,” or “coward.”
Here as in every case, the “problem” is simple and the “solution” even simpler: Our only real and durable power—a facet and expression of which is authentic courage—is sourced through the fountain of our true identity. The tricky and paradoxical part is that finding the wherewithal to stop running from that deeper self—and scurrying back into the seductive arms of the ego with all of its comfortable outrage and bravado—is the very act that requires the most courage. It will demand of us—not that we merely proclaim and declaim on the stage, protest line, or battlefield—but that we sit still and face the truth of who we are behind all of our thoughts. It means naming the egoic lies we may continue to feed on even as our deeper self knows they are lies. We must, that is, be courageous enough to experience that, at our core, there is nothing as easy or comfortable as moral outrage or anger to be found. Because love is who we are and not just something we do, we are fundamentally and gorgeously vulnerable, and unstoppable precisely for this reason.
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