I have repeatedly and relentlessly overcome fear in my life:

• As a chubby, cripplingly shy boy, I spent well over a decade learning to fight and even compete in multiple different styles of martial arts.
• I overcame massive anxiety and stage-fright and became a competitive ballroom dancer for over a decade.
• I built a career on jumping headfirst and unprepared into situations with ridiculously high stakes that others had given up on trying to resolve.
• I have flown, alone, to backwater, zero-English cities all over the planet, some in the midst of earthquakes or civil unrest.
• On not one, but two occasions I’ve saved someone from serious harm or possibly death by intervening in the course of a violent crime.
• I have stood in the face of knowing my child might die, and held it together for my family.

And yet, right now, reading an instruction manual on how to care for and braid my four year old daughter’s hair, I am filled with a surge of terror and dread I have serious doubts I will be able to overcome…