What do you do when fear grips you so badly that you can’t move an inch?

If you are a living, breathing human being, you will certainly experience this at some points of your life.

If you are ambitious or crave new experiences, trust me, you will frequently feel out of your depth and want to run back to your comfort zone.

I can speak about this with authority, because feeling scared about something I want to do is commonplace for me.

I am blessed with a lot of energy and new ideas. And when an idea of a project seizes me, it does so by my throat and pulls me into a whirlwind of excitement and planning. I love this stage so much – when an idea is fresh and untested but I know that it’s going to be fun implementing it.

I take off from the starting blocks and make it half-way down the road before the fear starts to creep in slowly but surely, like it does everytime.

It is usually at the midway point or at the point when pure adrenaline is no longer enough to sustain the idea, that my courage starts to fail me. Maybe I realise that I am lacking in some technical expertise that I need to progress this idea into a working prototype. Or I realise that I need access to financial resources that I don’t have. Or maybe I start to realise how much more complex this idea is than I thought to execute and it just doesn’t seem so sexy anymore.

There are many times that I lost steam and my efforts petered out to nothing.

But thankfully, there were the times that I kept going – maybe spurred on by sheer stubbornness or the desire to save face. I had come so far, so how could I stop now.

The truth is that not every idea is a million dollar idea. Some ideas are better off being left to die, so that you can focus your energies and resources on more worthwhile ones.

But, for me, at that midway point, I am not always in the best frame of mind to make that assessment. And truth be told, most often, my desire to stop is driven by fear.

I started blogging in 2005 and got into it a big way. I wasn’t just a blogger, I was interested in the practice and art of blogging. I was curious about how communities of bloggers grew and developed both as a unified force and also as a platform for nurturing individual dreams and talents.

So I volunteered on projects to nurture other bloggers. I participated in blogging rings and networks. Then I decided to research the female African blogosphere (what the communities of bloggers was referred to).

As I usually do, I went all out. I designed a survey and mapped out all the African female bloggers I knew. I reached out to each one of them individually (well over 200 bloggers if I remember correctly) and shared the survey with them.

Over the next few weeks, the responses started to trickle in and then I saw a call for articles for Oxfam’s Gender and Development journal. I thought “Why not?”

There is a saying about people being fearful, not of failure, but of success.

I think that the person who said that must have known me very well. I sent off an abstract to the journal and to my utter joy I was invited to submit a full article.

I fell into a happy rhythm working on the literature review for my article. My evenings after work were devoted to reading through the survey responses. Since I loved few things more than a good project to get stuck into and writing, I was in heaven.

Until I wasn’t enjoying it so much anymore.

I got to a point where the literature review had started to go on and on and I just wanted to be done with it.

The survey responses kept on coming in and coming in (a good and rare problem to have as I only discovered later on) and I had started to find the analysis tedious.

As I became fatigued of this project that was now sucking all my free time, I wondered what on earth I had been even thinking when I applied to submit an article in a ‘proper’ journal. How did I think they would even print this ‘article’? But that was if I ever finished it.

I read what I had written over so many times and it all seemed like a pile of horse you-know-what to me.

I put the article aside and had all but given up on ever completing it.

Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, in a brief moment of madness, I decided to send what I had so far to the editor. I think I even apologised that it wasn’t complete yet and that what I was sending was such a mess.

Bless her! Joanne (I think that was her name. If not, that is the name I have given her.) responded almost immediately and enthusiastically commended the ‘incredible work’ I had done. She said I was nearly there and gave me some very specific feedback to work on.

Before that experience, I would have said without guile that an editor’s job was to edit i.e. clean-up what a person had already written.

In that moment, I discovered that an editor is really like a football team’s entire supporters’ club condensed in a single human being.

She made me feel like I could get to that finish line. And not only that, but that I had already won.

Spurred on by her generous words, I pushed through like a marathoner in the last bit of the race (I’ve never run a marathon in my life, so I am using my imagination here..)

Somehow, I did it and my article was published. They sent me some copies of the journal for myself and to give out to friends and family.

So that was how I published my first solo article in a journal, pushing past the enormous amount of fear, the self-doubt and the fatigue.

On the journey of life, you will feel this fear plenty of times. Trust me about that. But if you are to achieve anything, you will have to learn how to gird your loins and keep going – fear be damned. Either that or get yourself a Joanne, who will gas you up and make you feel like you can do anything.