Occasionally people will tell me I’m brave, which I always find a little bit laughable because on the inside, I feel anything but brave. The literal title of this Substack has the words “anxious” and “introvert” in it, two words that seldom inspire thoughts of bravery.
But what I’m learning about being brave is that it takes practice. I don’t know if people are born brave; I certainly wasn’t. But the more brave things I do, the more brave things I want to do.
It’s sort of like that children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie …” Do you know it? The basic storyline is that if you give a mouse a cookie, then the mouse will want a glass of milk and then it progresses until it comes back around to the cookie again.
I feel like when I do one brave thing, then it gets easier to do the next brave thing and then the next one.
Sometimes, those things are surprising, even to me. I wasn’t expecting to be brave when I went to parents’ night at my daughter’s high school. But I was, and I have a picture to show for it.
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