I want to talk to you for a moment about fear.

Facing it is a part of both of my two pro­fes­sions (though I didn’t realize it until now). I’ve been tar­geted by rockets and mortar rounds. I’ve had over 10 pounds of high-explosive war­head det­o­nate close enough to knock me off my feet. I’ve stood ankle deep in absorbant boom soaked with enough toxic chem­i­cals to make a condor puke. I drove one of the last vehi­cles off a penin­sula as a major hur­ri­cane roared ashore.

None of that makes me spe­cial. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of mil­i­tary, law enforce­ment and dis­aster response pro­fes­sionals do that crap every day, all day. While my expe­ri­ence might sound impres­sive to the unini­ti­ated, it’s actu­ally fairly limited.

But its made me some­thing of a jour­neyman when it comes to facing fear. I’ve done it rather a lot, and devel­oped some strong coping mech­a­nisms that have allowed me to make risky deci­sions in my life, pushing for the brass ring I’d have oth­er­wise written off as too dan­gerous to pursue.

But lately, I’m seeing a new kind of fear. This is one I wasn’t ready for. You can train to handle the dra­matic fears I’ve described above (get­ting shot at, run­ning into danger, etc …). Drill and prac­tice make your reac­tions second nature. But this new fear? It’s exis­ten­tial. It’s bone-deep. It’s all-encompassing.

You can’t train for it. You can’t get ready for it. Good lord, you can’t fight it. It takes you in its jaws and shakes you. It is King-Kong to your beagle puppy. You don’t have a chance. I am not exag­ger­ating when I say that this is far, FAR worse than any­thing I ever stared down in Iraq, or on Deep­water Horizon, or during Hur­ri­cane Irene.

It’s fear of failure. It’s fear of finan­cial des­ti­tu­tion. It’s fear of having poured years of your life into chasing a dream only to come up empty. Many writers (some of my favorites) have been step­ping for­ward one after the other to pub­licly address the bone-rattling terror that seems to accom­pany this occu­pa­tion. Scott Lynch has gone public about his battle with anx­iety and depres­sion. Jim Hines blogged about it. Sal­adin Ahmed has just added his voice along with a cry for help. Brent Weeks recently tweeted “I don’t fear any­thing except for the future.” Their fears may not exactly marry up to what I’m describing, but I feel they orbit it, are tied in to the uncer­tainty asso­ci­ated with life as a free­lance artist.

I’m not that much of a vent in public guy, maybe because I’m lucky enough to have a strong net­work of friends and family who handle that for me. But as a guy who gave up a secure, well-paying job to chase his dream, let’s just say that I’m no stranger to fear like this.

I’ve watched Neil Gaiman’s fan­tastic com­mence­ment speech to the Uni­ver­sity of the Arts about 5 times now. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s more than worth the 20 min­utes. It’s witty, funny, charming, and above all, HOPEFUL. It’s one of the most encour­aging things I’ve seen in a long time.

But it’s also kind of glib.

That’s not Mr. Gaiman’s fault. He’s making a speech to his majority audi­ence: a packed house of early twenty-somethings about to grad­uate uni­ver­sity and seek out their first jobs. But most of the pro­fes­sional writers I know aren’t bright-eyed young­sters. They’re in their late thir­ties and for­ties, with fam­i­lies and mort­gages. They’re either risking it all like me, or holding down jobs they’d rather not be doing in order to make ends meet.

“Cat exploded?” Neil Gaiman asks. “Make good art…Leg crushed, then eaten by a mutated boa con­strictor? Make good art.”

Funny. Cool. True.

But those aren’t the issues those of us who don’t have decades to make a mis­take are facing. For us, it’s: “Can’t pay your rent? Make good art.” “Chil­dren forced to go to a subpar school because you can’t afford better? Make good art.” “Sac­ri­ficing the majority of your life to a job you HATE but can’t afford to leave? Make good art.” “Living without health insur­ance? Make good art.”

*That’s* the fear I’m talking about. Not just the fear of failure, the fear of BEING a failure.

I mulled this over with a former Navy SEAL friend of mine the last time I was in DC (remember I said that my front­line expe­ri­ences are nothing com­pared to many people? Case in point). After the SEALs, he secured a pow­erful job in a com­pany that’s now down­sizing. Lacking a col­lege degree, he feels he will be on the chop­ping block soon (so someone more edu­cated and less com­pe­tent can be retained). He gave me a good analogy that he uses to cope with this stuff. Granted, it’s hard oper­ator talk, but it helped me and I offer it up to all those out there strug­gling with the same relent­less anxiety.

In tac­tical pistol shooting, there’s a way you have to sight into your weapon to ensure you’re firing accu­rately. We call it “proper sight align­ment.” Proper sight align­ment is actu­ally coun­ter­in­tu­itive. You’re aiming at the target, so you focus on the target, right? Wrong. Do that, and you’re guar­an­teed to miss. In proper sight align­ment, the pistol’s rear sights are blurry, and so is the target.

The only thing that should be in focus is the front sight post, just five inches down length of the pistol barrel. That’s all you really see.

It’s bizarre, it’s coun­ter­in­tu­itive. Rea­son­able folks think it’ll never work. But it does. You pull that trigger, you focus on the front sight, and when you lift your head and look at the target, you’ll find your round has impacted center mass, every time.

The analogy is plain. Focus on your rear sights and you dwell on past: the mis­takes you’ve made. The time you’ve wasted. You could have. You should have. You would have.

Focus on the target, and you push out too far into the future. Who knows how the world will change? Who knows how others will react to you and your work? Who knows what will befall you? Fright­ened people are master pre­dic­tors. They think they’re Nostraf$#kingdamus. And they’re almost always wrong. Target focus saps the faith you need to keep going.

How do I deal with an uncer­tain future? By keeping my eyes on the front sight. I stick to the task at hand. I’ve got my 3rd book to finish. I’ve got my guard unit to take care of. I’ve got my new series to pitch. I might have a game to develop. What comes after? Hell, I don’t know. I’ll deal with that when it comes. I’d far rather not see what’s down range of my gun barrel so long as it means my rounds will be on target.

I got a lot of advice when I left gov­ern­ment to become a writer, but nobody was able to pre­pare me for this spe­cial kind of fear. My pro friends could hint at it, try to warn me of it, but in the end, I had to expe­ri­ence it for myself.

For­tu­nately for me, I am a person com­fort­able with dis­com­fort, and I offer this analogy for those who don’t have the ben­efit of my experiences.

Eyes on the front sight. Shoot and move. It might seem crazy, but it’s the only way you’re going to hit what you’re aiming at.

I’m with you. Let’s Go.