I Learned to Hide Fear From Watching My Mom Hide Hers

Prefer to watch? The video's below. Prefer to read? Keep going — this one's for you either way.

I've read so many books and taken so many courses, and I was still sitting there thinking, what should I even make a video about? And in that moment of not knowing, I understood exactly why people write scripts, why they pick a niche, why they figure things out before they hit record. It's starting to make sense to me now — but I'm here anyway, figuring it out as I go instead of planning it into the ground.

While I sat with that, I thought of a story about my mom.

The lift she never said a word about

We were in Jamaica, at a place with a ski lift up to a zipline course. My mom is usually talkative, always the fun one. But going up that lift, she went completely silent. I noticed, but I didn't think much of it — I was too busy holding on, trying to get a picture of the view.

When we got to the top, she hung back while the rest of us got strapped in for the zipline. I went back to check on her. "Hey, what's going on?" And that's when she told me — she was terrified. She'd been terrified the whole way up. She just never said anything.

She did it anyway. She didn't make a scene, didn't ask to turn back, didn't let anyone see it until I asked directly. She just held it, quietly, and moved through it.

What I actually learned from her

For a long time, I thought the lesson from that day was simple: feel the fear, do it anyway. And that part is true — I've carried it with me since, through a skydive I don't fully remember, through starting this channel, through this exact video.

But there's a second lesson underneath the first one, and it took me longer to see it. I didn't just learn to feel fear and move through it. I learned to do it silently — to keep it to myself so no one else has to carry it, or worry, or know I was ever scared at all.

That's not quite the same lesson. One is about courage. The other is about disappearing inside your own fear so completely that the people who love you don't even get to see it happening.

What I'm doing differently

I still believe in feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I'm not taking that back. But I'm trying to hold it differently than she did — out loud instead of silently, seen instead of hidden. Still choosing to hit record instead of waiting for the moment to be quiet and easy.

That's the part I'm working on. Not just doing the scary thing. Letting it be visible while I do it.

👉 Your turn: where have you been holding fear silently, so no one else has to carry it with you?