Scary Close-Reflections For Finding True IntimacyUddrag

Scary Close-Reflections For Finding True Intimacy

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Performance Anxiety in Real Life

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE I think many of us buy into a lie that we only matter if . . . We only matter if we are strong or smart or attractive or whatever.

It makes me wonder if this isn’t the reason I’ve struggled with a kind of performance anxiety. I’m not talking about the kind of anxiety you get before you have to give a speech or something. I’m talking about the fact I’d rather be alone or with a close friend than have to make small talk at a party. It’s exhausting to me and I feel like I’m acting in a play about life every time I have to do it.

I can trace my need to perform and impress people back to some of my earliest memories. Dad left just as I was coming into my own, I suppose—and my mother, sister, and I were feeling abandoned and neglected. In a way, being the only male, I felt like I had to be a bit bigger and better of a person than I was. This was foolish, of course, but kids don’t process reality objectively.

So it was during this season I developed a strange desire to convince people I was intelligent. For whatever reason, it became important to prove to my mother and sister, not to mention friends of the family, that I was smart and could handle things.

The problem is, I wasn’t exceptionally smart. I hated school, had no interest in books, and never did my homework.

Much of the time I’ve spent trying to impress people has been a waste. The reality is people are impressed with all kinds of things: intelligence, power, money, charm, talent, and so on. But the ones we tend to stay in love with are, in the long run, the ones who do a decent job loving us back.

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Scary Close-Reflections For Finding True Intimacy

“Love can’t be earned, it can only be given. And it can only be exchanged by people who are completely true with each other,” says Donald Miller. In this 7-day reading plan based on the book Scary Close, Don challenges our assumptions about what makes for good relationships and shares reflections from his own journey to “drop the act” and find true intimacy.

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