JUDY EMERSON Author and Personal Coach

I heard if you are confronted by a bear, you should stand tall and lift your arms wide to make yourself look larger than the bear, rising onto your toes, waving your arms, and bellowing. Screaming, if need be, to impress the bear with your dominance, so it would go away.

I have used that strategy too often in my life.

Life was scary, I thought. Like the biggest bear, and nobody was coming to help. When life got big right in front of me, I tried to be bigger, to be the very biggest. I tried to show that bear that I could overcome anything. That I would not turn and run. I would show the bear I was the biggest in the world, I was the smartest, and the bear would never get any advantage over me. Just so it wouldn’t eat me.

I wasn’t the biggest. It was always just lonely little me faced with so many bears—were they all bears? Those bears looked so much like the people who scared me when I was a kid. Was I really just afraid of being eaten by the past? Trying to overcome what had already gone away, so long ago? I was trying to prove myself against old nightmares.

Actually, the metaphor breaks down a bit. I did get loud with my kids very literally when they were little–I yelled at them a lot. But mostly, with other adults I just tried to make myself “big” as in impressive. I “performed” for attention, by my intellect (being a know-it-all), by “dazzling”, entertaining with my verbal prowess (holding an audience “hostage”) and wit, and by “talking big”–making inflated promises I couldn’t keep.

It was all a bluff anyway. I was never the biggest, the smartest, the funniest, or the most accomplished. I never had all the answers. It was very many years before I acknowledged that, or admitted I was actually still little and weak, afraid and alone in scary moments. But with a habit of “roaring”.

Life isn’t a bear at all—maybe just regular people all around, not out to get me, all trying to get by as best as they can figure it out. Lots of them are scared too. I’m sad that I frightened some people, and confused some others by roaring, when none of them were trying to eat me at all. I’m pretty sure a lot of them could see it was an act all along.

These days I’m trying not to wave my arms so much. And speak softer. Sorry for the noise.