The "change can be scary" conversation is all over TikTok right now, people talking about the big moves they're afraid to make, the lives they want to be living, the things standing between them and the version of themselves they can see from here. I've been posting in that space because I have a lot of first-hand data on this topic and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I have done the scary things. Multiple times. On purpose. While terrified. And I'm still here. So let me tell you what I actually know.
This is not going to be a motivational post in the usual sense. I'm not going to tell you fear is just excitement with better PR, or that the life you want is just one leap of faith away, or any of the other reassuring things that sound good but don't actually hold up under pressure. What I'm going to tell you is the truth, which is messier and also more useful: fear does not go away before you do the scary thing. Fear doesn't go away during the scary thing. Fear sometimes doesn't even go away after the scary thing. But you can do the thing anyway. And the thing, often, is worth it.
I have three things I can speak to from the inside. Leaving my hometown. Leaving the church. Releasing the first song. They're different kinds of change, geographic, spiritual, professional, but the fear architecture was similar enough that I can see the pattern across them, and the pattern is the thing I want to give you.
Leaving the Hometown
I grew up in a small Southern town. My aunt Deb still lives there, tends her chicken coop, sends me texts in all caps with no punctuation when something good happens with the album. My family is there. The church I grew up in is there. The particular smell of that place, the specific quality of the light in late summer, the feeling of being known by people who have known you since you were a kid, all of that was there and leaving it meant leaving all of that.
I left at twenty-two to come to the city and try to be a musician. Not because I wasn't scared. Not because I had a plan that I was confident in. Not because I'd somehow resolved the conflict between wanting to stay and needing to go. I left because staying felt more wrong than going, and that's the only math I had. The fear was present for the entire process: the months before leaving when I was second-guessing every night, the day of the actual move when I drove out of my hometown with everything I owned in a car that I was not confident would make the journey, the first weeks in a new city where I didn't know anyone and was working a bad job and sleeping in a room that was too small and wondering what I'd done.
It got better. Not immediately, not linearly, but it got better in the specific ways it needed to get better. I found the thing I was looking for, the people, the community, the way of working and living that was mine in a way the hometown wasn't. But I couldn't have known that in advance. I had to go find out. And finding out required leaving while scared.
Here's what I want to name specifically about hometown fear: the fear of hurting people you love by leaving. This one is real and it's worth sitting with rather than dismissing. Leaving the people who love you is a real cost. It changes relationships. My relationship with my family changed when I left, it got harder in some ways and deeper in other ways, and that trade-off is ongoing and complicated. I don't want to tell you that leaving doesn't cost anything. It does. The question is whether what you're going toward is worth what you're leaving behind. Only you can answer that. But "it will hurt some people I love" is not by itself a sufficient reason not to go. You are allowed to need things that require you to go find them.
Leaving the Church
I've written about the faith deconstruction extensively and I'm not going to do the full version again here. But the fear component of leaving, that specific shape of fear, is worth talking about because it's different from other kinds of change fear.
When you leave a faith tradition that was your entire community, your entire cosmological framework, your entire understanding of your own identity and history, you're not just changing a belief. You're dismantling the structure that told you what things meant. Who you are without that structure is genuinely unclear, at first. You step out of the framework and there's a terrifying amount of open space. What do you believe? What do you live by? Who are your people now? Those questions don't have ready answers when the framework is gone. You have to build new ones, and you build them slowly, and the building takes years and you're doing it in the open without a net.
The fear of leaving the church, for me, was specifically the fear of that open space. Not hell, I'd already done enough reading that hell had become a different kind of conversation, but the fear of meaninglessness. The fear that without the story I'd been living inside, nothing would add up to anything. That my life would just be a series of events without significance.
What I found on the other side, eventually, was that meaning isn't granted by a framework. It's made. You make it through your relationships, your work, your choices, the things you give yourself to. Meaning is not something that happens to you when you believe the right things. It's something you build by being present to your own life and caring about things and showing up. I make music because it means something to me. I write about what I've been through because it seems to mean something to some of you. That meaning is real whether or not it's endorsed by an institution. It's mine. And the terrifying open space I was afraid of turned out to have ground in it, once I stopped expecting it to look like what I'd left.
Releasing the First Song
The professional fear is different from the life-change fears, but it's not smaller. When you release something you made, genuinely made, from your own guts, with your own voice saying your own things, you are offering up something that cannot be separated from you. Rejection of the work is rejection of the part of you that made the work. That is not a rational equation and it doesn't matter that it's not rational. It's what it feels like. And feeling that possibility, and releasing the thing anyway, is one of the most specifically terrifying experiences of my adult life.
The first song I posted publicly, I did it at 2am on a weeknight because I knew if I waited until I felt ready I would never feel ready and it would never happen. I put it up and then I left my apartment and walked around the block for forty-five minutes because I couldn't be in the same room as my phone. I went back. People had listened. Some had said things. The world had not ended. The song was out there and it was doing the thing songs do, which is finding the people it was for, without me having to manage that process or protect it or translate it. It just went.
HEATHEN HYMNS is that, multiplied by thirteen songs and a year of making and all the specific weight of everything the record carries. Putting it out was the scariest professional act of my life. Every single song on it is something I cannot take back. It's all out there now, all of it, doing what it does. And the fear before releasing it was exactly proportional to how much it mattered. The fear was information: this matters to you. Which is why you're afraid. Which is why you should do it anyway.
Fear as a Compass
The framework I've landed on, built from these experiences. Fear, the real significant kind, not the "I don't want to do this bureaucratic task" kind, is usually pointing at something that matters. Small things that don't matter don't generate that level of fear. The physiological fear response is mobilized by things that are high stakes. And if something is high stakes, it's usually because it's significant to you in some meaningful way.
So when you feel fear that big, the question to ask is not "how do I get rid of this fear" or "how do I know this is the right thing." The question is: what is this fear pointing at? If the answer is "this thing that I want and that is mine to pursue," then the fear is not a stop sign. It's a compass pointing at what matters.
I am not going to tell you all scary things work out. They don't, always. I've made changes that were scary and that also didn't produce what I hoped. Life is not a success narrative where every courageous act is rewarded. But I have never, not once, regretted doing the thing that was scary and mine, even when it didn't go the way I needed. I have regretted not doing things. The unlived choice has its own particular ache that doesn't go away the way the fear of acting would have gone away.
Do it scared. Do it with the fear right there in the car with you. Do it knowing you might be wrong. Do it because the alternative, waiting for certainty, waiting to not be afraid, waiting for the moment you feel ready, is not coming. The moment is now, while you're scared. The fear is the indicator. Go.
I love you. I really do. And I believe in the scared version of you just as much as the ready one.