What Are You Afraid Of, Underneath the Proving?
by Michael Feeley
Underneath the proving, there’s usually a fear. Not always spoken, sometimes not even fully known, but it’s there. The fear of being dismissed. Overlooked. Underestimated. Disrespected. Patronized. Quietly filed under done. Told, without anyone saying it out loud, that your best contribution is behind you.
That fear is what makes proving necessary in the first place. Nobody proves what nobody questions. And for those of us moving through what I call the vintage years, the question gets asked more often than we’d like, by a job market, a room that stops looking at us, a culture that keeps a folder labeled retired open and waiting.
So we prove. We stay active, sharp, useful, giving. And that’s real. I stand by it.
But I want to name something else too: the deepening I keep writing about, as we mature, isn’t only striving. It includes rest. It includes stillness that asks nothing of itself. A day with no goal accomplished can still be a full day. If proving becomes another way of never being enough — another finish line moving just out of reach — then it has quietly become the very cage I warned against yesterday.
So today, less declaration, more question, for you, and for me:
What are you trying to prove? And who, really, is it for?
Is it the fear talking? Or the becoming?
Thanks – Michael (he, him)
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This also matters – Fearless and Fear Less.
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