Fuori Fa Meno Paura
Outside is less scary. A lesson I learned in the dark.
At six in the evening, the light disappeared.
Completely. One minute there was still some sun behind the trees, and the next minute it was gone, and it would not come back until six in the morning.
No electricity. No power. No light switch to reach for out of habit. Just a small house in the middle of the jungle, and me inside it, for eight nights.
I was there for something bigger than a vacation. An intense spiritual experience, the kind that strips away everything you use to distract yourself. And one of the biggest lessons did not come from a ceremony or a teacher.
It came from being alone in the dark, terrified of my own house.
Here is what happened every night.
I would walk into that little house and the sounds would start. A noise I did not recognize. A vibration under my feet that I could not explain. My brain, which had never lived without light before, started building a whole world out of nothing. What was that. What is out there. What if something happens and no one hears me.
I tried to sleep. I would wake up an hour later even more scared than before, because in the dark, alone, with no one to check my thoughts against, fear does not stay the same size. It grows. It invents. It tells you stories you would never believe in daylight.
At some point, one night, I could not take it anymore.
I opened the door.
It was still the middle of the night. Still dark. Nothing about the hour had changed. The only thing on my side was a full moon, just enough light coming down through the trees to make outside feel different from the pitch black of the house.
And the strangest thing happened. The same noises that had terrified me for hours suddenly felt smaller, only because I was standing in the middle of them instead of hiding from them behind a door.
I remember standing there, under that moon, saying it out loud, almost surprised by my own voice:
Outside, it is actually less scary.
I thought, at first, that this was just a story about a jungle and a scary night. A funny memory to tell at dinner.
But then I came home. And I started noticing the same pattern everywhere, in a life that has plenty of electricity and plenty of light and none of that seems to matter, because the dark I am talking about is not the kind you fix with a switch.
It is the dark inside your own head.
The version of a conversation you have not had yet, that gets worse every time you replay it. The version of a decision you have not made yet, that grows teeth the longer it stays inside you. The version of a fear that only exists because you have never actually opened the door to look at it.
That is when I understood what the jungle was really teaching me.
Whatever you are holding inside your head is always heavier than it is once you take it outside.
The same week I got back, I was anxious. Just the regular weight of running a business and a life at the same time. And instead of doing what I usually do, which is wait until the anxiety passes or blame someone for it, I told myself something simple.
Tonight, you are going to the gym. Alone.
I cannot tell you how many times I have packed my bag, said the same sentence to myself, and then not gone. Because I need someone waiting for me. An appointment. A friend. Anyone to make the commitment real, because apparently my own word to myself has never been enough.
But that night, I went. By myself. For the first time, no one was expecting me there.
And when I finished, something had physically left my body. The anxiety I had been carrying all day was gone, because I took it out of my head and put it into my body, into a room, into a barbell, into something outside of me.
Fuori fa meno paura.
Outside is less scary.
And then I thought about the conversations I keep avoiding.
I am a people pleaser. I will admit that plainly, because it is true. There are conversations I need to have with people on my team, direct conversations, adult conversations, that I have postponed for weeks because in my head they turn into disasters. I imagine the hurt on their face. I imagine them not being able to receive it. I imagine the relationship breaking.
None of that has happened yet. It only happens in the version that lives inside my head, at night, alone, with no light on.
I have never once had one of those conversations and found it as bad outside as it was inside.
Not once.
So I am starting to wonder how much of my life I have spent scared of a house, when the actual jungle outside, dark and all, was never the monster my head built at midnight.
I think about Tony Robbins a lot, and I consider him a friend even though he has no idea who I am. He says it simply. If you are in your head, you are dead. Same lesson, different classroom.
But there is something about learning it barefoot in the dark, with no electricity and no one to save you, that hits differently than hearing it from a stage. Nature does not explain itself gently. It just puts you in the situation and lets you feel the whole thing, until you are forced to open the door yourself.
And once you open it, you cannot unlearn what is on the other side.
So here is what I am practicing now, in the most ordinary parts of my life. The employee conversation I have been avoiding. The workout I keep promising myself and not doing. The relationship where I am guessing instead of asking. The decision I keep turning over at eleven at night instead of just making it in the morning.
Every single time, the instruction is the same.
Open the door.
Because whatever is waiting for you outside, even if it is uncomfortable, even if it is hard, is almost never as bad as the version your mind built while you were sitting alone in the dark with it.
This week’s question
What door have you been standing in front of, too scared to open, because the version in your head is worse than anything waiting on the other side?
Every week, I write one honest letter from inside the life I am building, the business, the book, and the woman behind both. If this resonated with you, subscribe and come back next Sunday.