You Don’t Have To Wait For The Fear To Leave

By: Tamara Gestetner

There’s a moment at the start of almost every recording when my producer says we’re rolling and I look into the camera and the fumbling begins. My guest is sitting right there, watching me stumble over the first line of my own introduction, the one I wrote and read out loud an hour earlier. Sometimes it’s bad enough that we stop and I ask to redo it after they’ve logged off so no one has to witness the version where I truly cannot get the words out in order. When I go back to edit the episode later, I fast forward through that part. I don’t even watch it back. I just skip it, the way you’d skip past a photo of yourself you don’t like.

There’s a specific kind of fear that does not announce itself as fear. It shows up as a locked jaw. As a sentence that was fully formed in your head but disappears, replaced by a blank white wall. My podcast guest sits there waiting patiently for me to say the thing I was trying to recall, yet I can’t find the first word of my own name. This is not a classic case of nerves in the cute, pre-show jitters sense. This is closer to a small internal collapse, the kind where your body decides that it would rather freeze than fumble.

Here’s the part that’s almost funny—if I let myself laugh at it. I’m fairly certain that most people do not even notice the stutter. Or if they do, it’s so small and insignificant that it barely registers as anything. But in my own mind, it’s enormous. It plays back at full volume in slow motion, magnified into something that feels like proof of some deeper flaw when to everyone else, it was just two seconds of a woman gathering her breath before she starts talking. The gap between how loud something feels inside you and how invisible it is to everyone else is where fear does its worst work. It convinces you that your private catastrophe is a public one. It almost never is.

I have thought a lot about why this particular fear (small as it is in the grand scheme of things) has had such an outsized grip on me. I think it’s because a stutter, even a fleeting one, feels like a betrayal from the one tool, my voice, that I have built my entire life around. I talk for a living. I listen for a living. Words are my whole business. So, when my own mouth fails me, even for two seconds, it does not feel like a minor glitch. It feels like the ground collapsing under the one thing I was sure I could count on.

I imagine this is true for a lot of us, that the fear that paralyzes us most is rarely random. It usually finds the exact spot where we feel we have the least room to fail. Because here is what fear does when you let it drive instead of ride along. It does not just make you stutter through an introduction. It makes you not start the podcast at all. It makes you not write that book, not raise your hand, not say the true thing out loud in the room where it needed to be said. It does not arrive with a warning label. It disguises itself as being “not ready yet” or bad timing, or impracticality. I know this because I have lived both versions. There were years, more than I’d like to admit, where I let a stutter, or the fear of one, quietly talk me out of things I now know I was meant to do. Not dramatically. Nobody stages a big moment of giving up. It is quieter than that. You just don’t send the email. You don’t apply. You let the opportunity slip past its deadline while telling yourself you were simply too busy, not ready yet, waiting for a better time.

Looking back now, I can name at least a handful of doors I let close because I was too afraid to test whether they would hold my weight.

I honestly wish I didn’t stutter. I’ve kind of made peace with it, but I’m not going to pretend that I would choose it if I were building myself from scratch. Somewhere along the way, I refused to let it be the reason why I didn’t do the things I love and am genuinely called to do. The stutter could come along. It was not getting a vote on whether I showed up. I think this is the actual work of a meaningful life, not becoming a person who no longer feels afraid, but becoming a person who stops asking fear for permission to do the things you love.

There’s a statistic that gets quoted so often that it has almost become a cliché, something like 95% of what we fear never actually happens. I don’t know the precise study behind that number any more than most people do, but I know it’s true in the room, over and over, with the people who sit across from me. The presentation they were sure would go badly went fine. The conversation they avoided for six months turned out to be a relief once it finally happened. The diagnosis they were bracing for was not the one they got. The version of themselves they were so afraid the world would see never actually showed up, because it never existed outside their own head in the first place. We spend so much of our lives rehearsing disasters that never arrive, and the rehearsal itself becomes its own kind of suffering, sometimes worse than the thing we were afraid of.

For people who live with anxiety, and I sit with many of them, this is not a comforting statistic so much as an exhausting daily argument. The irrational thought does not care that it is irrational. It arrives fully dressed as certainty. It insists, convincingly, that this time is different, that this fear is the one that is finally going to come true. Living with anxiety often means running that argument all day, every day, against a mind that keeps producing disasters that never arrive and somehow still believing the next one might be real. It is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not lived it, the sheer effort of talking yourself off a ledge that a calmer mind would never have climbed onto in the first place, and then having to do it again an hour later about something else entirely. I do not say this from the outside. I say it because I know what it costs to keep showing up anyway when your own mind is working against you in real time, and because I want anyone reading this who fights that particular fight every day to know that the fight itself is not a character flaw. It’s simply a harder terrain to walk, and walking it anyway counts for more than people who don’t have to realize.

And yet the episode airs. Every time. Not because the fear finally got small enough to ignore, but because at some point in that dark two seconds, something in me kept moving anyway. I did not wait to feel ready. I have never once felt “ready.” I opened my mouth again while the wall was still up, and somehow the next word came and then the one after that, and by the third sentence, I was back, shaky but back, and my guest was still there, with no idea what just happened in my head.

There’s an old idea I come back to often, that faith isn’t the absence of fear, but the willingness to take the next step while the fear is still sitting right there next to you, uninvited, arms crossed, along for the ride whether you like it or not. You don’t wait for it to get out of the car. You just stop letting it drive. I think that is closer to what it means to walk with faith than the version we’re usually handed, the one where belief is supposed to erase doubt and courage is supposed to erase fear. In my experience, and in the experience of nearly everyone I have ever talked to, that’s not how it works. The fear stays. The doubt stays. What changes is your relationship to them, whether you keep negotiating with them before you are allowed to move, or whether you finally just move, uninvited passenger and all.

I don’t think I’m going to stop stuttering through my intros. I’ve stopped treating the stutter as proof that I’m not cut out for this, or that the fear means something is wrong with me. The fear is just there, the way it’s always been there in the room before every hard conversation I’ve ever had, personal or professional, before every episode, before every session where I have to say something a client does not want to hear. What I know now that I didn’t know a few seasons ago is that I’m allowed to begin anyway, mid-stumble, mid-fumble, camera rolling, guest watching, and the words will come back. They always do. Not because I got braver. Because I stopped requiring myself to feel brave first.

We are, most of us, so much stronger than we think we are, not because we’ve eliminated the thing that scares us, but because we’ve quietly kept showing up despite it. Two seconds of silence. And then a voice, however shaky, that decides to speak anyway. That, I have come to believe, is the whole of it. Not the absence of the stutter. Just the refusal to let it be the last word. 

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.