Book Review: My Year With Eleanor

Hello dear Steemians!

Today I want to share some of my thoughts on a really good book that I read recently which deals with the topic of fear: "My Year With Eleanor" by Noelle Hancock.

After getting fired from her time-consuming job, Noelle realized how much she had changed over the years. She was no longer that spontaneous girl full of life she once had been. She retreated into her comfort zone, and avoided new situations, new people and new challenges. She started questioning her current way of life and decided that something had to change.

One day, she stumbled upon a quote in a random bar written on the chalkboard. It was Eleanor Roosevelt's famous quote that goes like this:

"Do one thing every day that scares you."

A crazy idea started forming in her mind and, soon, a bold decision was made. She was going to face her fears each and every day for the next 365 days, that is, until her 30th birthday. She faced many of her fears, some as extreme as swimming with the sharks, skydiving, piloting, climbing the Kilimanjaro, and some more down-to-earth as talking with her ex-boyfriends about their relationship, volunteering in a hospital and spending a few days alone and in silence, away from technology. In this book, she describes her journey through her valley of fear in a simple and humurous way.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

I bought this book because its description really got me intrigued (and it was on a discount hehe). I remember thinking: "Wow, is this really possible? For someone to make this type of a decision and really stick to it EVERY SINGLE DAY? For a whole year?" Well, since I am a kind of a scaredy-cat type of person, trying to deal with some of my fears, I had to have this book. I had to find out more.
Honestly, it caused a lot of turmoil inside of me. There were many times when it made me feel really uncomfortable, and silently cringe. It also made me question a lot of my own fears. Naturally, I was amazed by it.

So, what did I learn from Noelle's story?

• Everything is scarier in your head than in real life.
  The situations she faced almost never were as bad as she thought they would be. Actually, the worst part was just before doing something scary. Sometimes she even ended up having fun and loving it (e.g. skydiving), and most of the time it was better than she could even imagine.

• Some fears are good for us and it's okay to have them.
  Swimming with sharks was traumatic for Noelle. Water started entering her diving mask, she panicked, and the cage she was in was not really safe, so the whole experience was a bad one for her. But it made her realize that, on some level, we are just living beings trying to survive in this world, and that some fears are good for us because they help us survive. It is, however, important to distinguish positive fears from the ones that are just harming us by holding us back in life.

• Scary moments are as brief as the happy ones.
  Nothing is permanent, good or bad, and it will pass. This got me thinking that perhaps we feel that scary moments are somehow bigger and more problematic because we either imagine it happening a zillion times before it actually happens, or we relive it in our heads hundreds of times after we experience something that we don't like?

• Over time, fear loses its power and you learn to let go
  This is perhaps the most important lesson. Fear can't hold you forever. It will fade away over time if you decide to face it, and this will reflect on your whole life.

Photo by Justin Luebke on Unsplash

In the end, I would like to recommend this book to anyone who is curious about fear and who wants to learn something about dealing with it, because there are so many other lessons other than the ones mentioned above that you can get from this book. If you are, however, an adventurer and risk-taker already, then perhaps it won't be as compelling to you as it is to me, but it's still a good light read :)