105: The Costs of Courage

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Oh my God. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships, and its hidden costs and shadows. In a world where we other people, where we build walls, we just tear down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it. Hey friends, I'm Laura. Welcome back to How to Make Love. A podcast designed to grow your love, courage, and justice muscles. It's about helping you create what you value in your life. And today we're diving into courage. A while back we had an episode called How to Courage, and I really recommend giving that a listen maybe even before this episode.

Speaker 1: In it I define courage, something like the choice to be whole, to pursue wholeness both individually and collectively. We'll play with that definition of courage some today, but mostly honestly, I want to knock courage off the pedestal we put it on. I want to be brutally honest about the real costs of courage. If courage were a stock, it would be a terrible investment. It's mostly an unpleasant experience. It comes with a giant price tag. And yet I start every episode by saying, this podcast is about growing your courage, muscles beeps and boobs and bops, and there's hypocrisy there, right? Why would I tell you to do something that mostly sucks? Well, I think the truth is that courage, like a lot of things in life sucks, mostly sucks, but I think you and I should do it anyway. And today we're going to unpack the hard why behind courage because I want you to walk into it with your eyes wide open.

Speaker 1: I want you to consent to the costs of courage rather than stumble into them or feel regret or resentment later on. Courage. The way I see it isn't about fearlessness at all. And again, we talked about that in the old episode, how to courage. It's about feeling fear and living through that fear and acting anyway, acting with the fear. It's the willingness to show up, uncertain, scared, uncomfortable, because courage isn't about making things easier. It's about being willing to be broken, open over and over in the pursuit of something more real and more honest. But I want to be clear, courage isn't just about personal growth. It's about contributing to something bigger than ourselves, A collective healing, a collective freedom. And I think we all know that courage is the fuel, the lifeblood of liberation and justice. It's the engine behind a more whole and heal world for everybody.

Speaker 1: So when I talk about something more real, more honest, I mean that for you. I mean that for me. I mean that for all of us, which is why I can't personally separate things like love and justice, courage and justice. They're just so intrinsically linked for me because courage is and courage unless it takes us to more real places, more honest places, and we can't talk about equity or inclusivity if we aren't willing to see. And then go to sort of bleak truths of how and why we are so far from realizing those missions. So again, this episode is going to be about the costs of choosing courage. But before we really dig in there, I think it's important to define courage for yourself. I define courage in a couple of ways. I define it as the choice to be whole, and I also define it as the willingness to witness and feel everything ideally without numbing out or shutting down or bypassing emotions or experiences or other people along the way.

Speaker 1: It's also about risking your identity, like letting go of what feels safe. It's about staying open when the world tells you to protect yourself and harden and defend. I also think courage is surrendering to the unknown. It's saying yes to the journey, knowing that there's no guarantee, there's no promise of safety, and maybe knowing you'll never reach the destination, but still you choose to pursue it anyway. Courage is daunting, it's confusing, it's often painful, and that's what makes it courage. So now you need to define courage for yourself. If you want to make it and enact it, know it, wield it, inspire it. My definition, choosing to be whole or choosing to feel it all is based on the fact that I'll never reach those goals. Like I'll never be fully whole. I'll never feel everything that I am capable of feeling. I'm destined to fail.

Speaker 1: I'm going to cower in fear from all kinds of things, but I still want to be someone willing to feel it all. I want to grow into that person, even though I know I'll never fully arrive there. And that's a part of why courage is so hard, because it feels impossible most of the time. It is impossible most of the time. So you need to define it for yourself. And the very definition should tell you something about why courage is so hard, why it's so often an impossibility. This impossibility is just one of the cost of courage. And that's what the rest of this episode is about, redefining courage, rethinking it, and helping you decide whether you really want to choose it and win and why and how. I don't think any of us can choose courage for ourselves if we're clinging to a fairytale definition of it, nor do I believe that the status quo definition will lead us to collective liberation.

Speaker 1: So either now or by the end of the episode or at the end of the episode, make sure you define or redefine courage for yourself. It doesn't need to be hard, doesn't need to be fancy, doesn't be long, but it does need to challenge the status quo. It should reveal the impossibility of courage, highlight its costs, and most importantly, inspire something inside you, something deep and wise, something already whole. Courage should call to that part of you and draw it out again. That's what makes it courage. Now, the rest of this episode is real. Talk about the costs of courage. It will cost you your comfort. It's going to cost you relationships, and often it's going to cost you your sense of certainty. And yet I'm going to make the case that choosing courage is worth it, not in spite of the costs, but largely because of them. Last, we'll also explore though briefly how courage connects to the collective work of liberation, of building something bigger than ourselves. So saddle up. Welcome to a conversation about the shadow sides of courage and why we should choose something, even when, and maybe especially when we're destined to fail to realize it.

Speaker 1: Let's talk about what courage actually costs. I'm not here to scare you and I'm not here to romanticize courage either. This isn't about fear or making courage sound bigger or shiny or sexier than it is. It's about giving you truth so that you can decide whether courage is something you are willing to choose or when it's something you're willing to choose. Because the reality is that courage is really, really expensive, and I think we all need to know what we're paying for before we make the leap so that we can do that with a whole heart and with full consent. So first, there's the emotional cost of courage. Courage is going to break your heart. Why? Because choosing courage, you're choosing to feel everything. The full range of human emotions, joy, yes, but also pain and doubt and shame and fear and failure. It doesn't discriminate.

Speaker 1: So when you open the door to courage, you open the door to vulnerability. You're saying yes to feeling things that a lot of people spend their lives avoiding entirely half of what you'll feel. It's going to suck. Let's be honest. Rejection, fear, disappointment, guilt, they're all part of the package. And courage makes you feel more, not less. And that includes the feelings we'd rather run from because courage pulls us out of our comfort. It asks us to face things head on, to step into the unknown, and stepping into the unknown almost always brings uncertainty and discomfort. So when you choose courage, you choose to feel more of life, not less of life, but remember half of life. It's pretty hard to feel and experience stuff. And courage doesn't give you a pass from feeling that courage can also bring anxiety and self-doubt because stepping into courageous action means leaving the safety of what we've known.

Speaker 1: And our brains don't tend to like uncertainty. They crave safety, they create predictability and control. And courage sort of flies in the face of all that. It pushes you into unknown territory and that can often create anxiety. You might question yourself, you might wonder if you're making the right choice and the internal battle of am I doing the right thing? That can be really mentally exhausting, that is actual labor. It can be a very difficult price to pay for a lot of us. And then still in this sort of bucket of emotional costs, I'm going to say there's the possibility of an even deeper toll, which is the possibility of trauma. For those who choose courage in the face of systemic injustice or violence, the cost can be more than just emotional. It can be deeply traumatic facing aggression threats or even emotional harm in the pursuit of justice or in the pursuit of any kind of courage isn't something that comes with without a cost.

Speaker 1: It leaves a mark and that might be a part of the burden. Courage places on us, especially if we live in bodies of color or bodies or identities that have been historically marginalized and abused, choosing courage can at times have traumatic implications. So those are some of the emotional costs of courage. Let's go to relational costs. When you choose courage, you're likely going to disrupt the dynamics around you. Because courage isn't neutral, it challenges the status quo. If you're showing up courageously, you are likely going to speak truths that others may not want to hear, or you're going to be standing up when others prefer to be seated, and that's going to make some people uncomfortable and some of those folks are going to distance themselves from you because your presence or your insistence on courage will dredge up stuff that not everyone wants to consent to feel or to see or to confront.

Speaker 1: You might threaten their sense of safety, and I'm not judging that. I'm not judging your choice or their response. I've had my sense of safety threatened before by others' choices to be brave and I wasn't ready and so I walked away and I have compassion for those moments in my life. And still you may lose people you love. So there's isolation sometimes when it comes to courage. Courage has a tendency to make you feel like the outlier, the person in the room who speaks up when others stay silent, the person who challenges the system when others comply, and that can be really lonely. You might find yourself marginalized in spaces where you once felt at home and the weight of that isolation can be crushing. I also think courage typically invites some social backlash, like standing up for something controversial. Whether you're in your community or online or at work can lead to public shaming.

Speaker 1: It can lead to harassment or ridicule. You might face bullying or character attacks, particularly in environments like social media where courage is often met with this sort of viciousness because courage threatens the comfort of others. And when people feel threatened, they push back. And again, there is often an embodied vitriol or violent rhetoric when society pushes back against people of color and people on the margins. These costs of courage can't be ignored. They are real and they are possible. And depending on how you speak out or what you look like or who you are, those costs may tax the relationships and dynamics around you in very visceral real ways. Professionally, courage can be even riskier. It could cost you your job, your opportunities, or even your financial stability. Why? Because most professional environments value compliance and comfort over truth and disruption. If you are the one speaking up or pushing for justice or advocating for change, you might be labeled difficult and difficult.

Speaker 1: People tend to find themselves being passed over for promotions or sometimes even let go. In some cases. Courage might force you to choose between your values and your livelihood, between doing what's right and keeping your paycheck or between doing what is aligned with your personal values and keeping your paycheck. It's not hypothetical. It's very real. People have lost jobs, careers and professional networks because they dare to speak up or take a stand about the things that they really, really cared for or needed in order to be whole. Obviously, the more economic and social privilege you have, the more you may be able to afford to take those risks. And yet courage may ask many of us to make these sorts of choices regardless. It doesn't mean we have to. I'm not telling you that you have to pay any of these costs. That's not the point of this conversation.

Speaker 1: But I do want you to see the costs with more mindful clarity so that you can be a true yes or a true no or a true maybe to the decisions you make along the way. I also want to be really explicit again that these costs often come with additional burdens and stakes professionally, personally, societally, depending on what you look like and how much you already are on the margins based on your identity markers. Courage doesn't just cost you financially or professionally or personally. It can also cost us physically, especially if you are a human who's committed to justice. Courage might even mean putting yourself in harm's way, whether it's facing arrest or receiving threats or being treated as a whistleblower, whatever it is, but not just in that sort of extreme, putting your body on the line kind of way. I also think a lot of people who have deep practice of courage take on physical health strain, chronic stress, insomnia, burnout, anxiety.

Speaker 1: When you're living in a state of heightened emotional or mental tension, which can often happen with courage, the body's going to feel the effects of that. I know I've mentioned a lot of costs so far, some more extreme than others, but of course there are more. I've personally found that an acting courage can come with a big spiritual or sort of existential set of costs too. When you choose to stand up for what's right, when you choose to take risks on behalf of our collective wellbeing or the wellbeing of your family or your community or of yourself, you can sometimes be forced to confront who you are and what you really stand for. And sometimes that internal reckoning can be really unsettling. You might find that the version of yourself that you are doesn't fully align to the person you want to be or to become or maybe the person you once were.

Speaker 1: And that can be tough. There can also be this sort of spiritual exhaustion that comes with practicing courage. You can lose faith pretty easily, or at least I can lose faith pretty easily. I can lose hope, hope and faith in yourself or in others or in the possibility of change. I mean, I'll be honest, and I've mentioned this in a few episodes recently, I'm a bit there right now. I feel so deeply saddened by the state of our world and the climate crisis and ongoing war and genocide and the lack of courage of our political candidates, either of them, to stand out against that genocide, the way that humans treat one another. It all just compiles, and I have lost a lot of my hope and faith. So courage can be draining, especially when it feels like changes isn't coming where the results are slow and all of that can leave you feeling hopeless or helpless, and it can turn you from someone who's optimistic to someone who's potentially quite pessimistic or someone who maybe used to feel a lot of joy, who feels sad now a lot.

Speaker 1: And all of that can lead to social isolation and despair and depression. I don't think we should underestimate the spiritual costs of courage, of practicing courage and the dark deep places that that can lead us to. Last on the sort of personal set of costs front, there's also the paradoxical cost of not choosing courage mentally. We can really do number on ourselves either by how we judge ourselves for not being the person we want to be or by the emotional bypassing we sometimes need to do to justify not taking action. Both come with big price tags, conforming to the status quo and not enacting courage when we know we should or when we really deep down our values call us to. That comes with a big cost, as does the possible guilt and shame that sometimes comes up when we are generally really courageous folks.

Speaker 1: But choose in moments not to say or do the courageous thing for self-care. Community care, again, I'm not calling any of those things good or bad. I don't believe in a right or wrong set of behaviors. I just want us to have names and language and transparency around courage and the costs that come with it. And sometimes there is a cost in not enacting courage beyond the personal. There's also a set of collective costs to courage. I think as a society, when we choose courage, we destabilize things like on purpose. Courage disrupts the systems and the structures that maintain inequity and oppression and harm. And when people come together in courage, when they speak truth to power or when they demand justice, or when they just force others to grow around them, they're destabilizing the very foundations that keep those systems and have kept those systems intact and those systems well, we all know that they're not passive systems.

Speaker 1: They push back hard. The day that I was planning this episode and making some notes, I took a break to check the news and saw all these forceful arrests of peaceful protestors in New York City speaking out against the ongoing genocide and Palestine systems when challenged will use the full force of their power, the full force of their law. Sometimes those costs are social or political, and sometimes those costs are lethal. If we think about any major social movement, civil rights, or women's suffrage or trans rights or queer rights or climate justice, none of those things have moved forward without immense collective courage, and none of them came without sacrifice. Collective courage forces ine equitable systems to crack, but the cost is that things often get far harder before they get any better. The backlash, the resistance, the fear, it all intensifies before real change happens. And I believe we are living in a time of a lot of cracking and therefore a tremendous amount of backlash. So when we choose courage, especially collectively, we need to be eyes wide open about that. We need to ask ourselves or ourselves, are we willing to have it be way worse for the hope for the possibility, but not the guarantee that things might be better?

Speaker 1: So if courage costs so much, why choose it at all? I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the rewards outweigh the cost because sometimes they won't or they don't. There's no guarantee that the benefits of courage will ever show up in the way that you hope. You might spend decades pushing for justice and never see the change you want. You might show up for a relationship with all the courage that you have and still lose it. That's just the brutal truth. Courage does not come with a promise. There's no guarantee of a happy ending. And if you're waiting for certainty before you choose it, you're going to be waiting forever. So why choose it? I mean, of course I have some opinions, but the real point of this episode is that you have to ask yourself that question and have an answer that is specific to you.

Speaker 1: I can tell you that living in fear or inauthenticity is a half-life. I can tell you that the alternative to courage often means staying small or staying in the comfort of your limitations or limiting your growth and development. I can tell you that courage is connecting and that it's going to deepen your relationship to yourself and to your family and your community and to the world around you. I can tell you what I've learned from being an end of life doula and that at some point it will just be you and your breath and your heart leaving this world, and you will have to answer to you, to your heart. And those last silent moments about how you feel about the life you lived, I can tell you all that stuff, but some of that matters and some of it doesn't. And it's not all going to matter in the same ways to each of us.

Speaker 1: I don't have answers for you, my friends. My gift is in asking questions, questions that grab you by the sole of your throat, questions that you don't have to answer, but I think will expand you if you choose to. So naturally, I'm going to offer you some questions here because I have no idea whether or why or when you should choose courage. I have no idea the cost you will pay, how big those costs will be or how often you'll have to pay them. But before I give you questions, I also want to remind you, there will be times when courage feels like too much, when the costs feel too high, and that's okay. Part of choosing courage is also choosing when not to push. Knowing your limits, knowing your boundaries and respecting them is a part of the process. Courage is about staying open, sure, but it's also about knowing when you need to protect yourself, when you need to take care of yourself.

Speaker 1: You don't owe the world your constant bravery. Courage isn't a switch that you can just leave on all the time. So what I really want to remind you of is that courage is the choice. It's a choice that's yours to make and yours to decline. And there's no one size fits all answer here. And the most important thing is that when you choose courage, you do so with full consent. You're saying yes to the risks, yes to the unknowns, yes to the potential of failure. And you're also saying yes to your limits. Courage doesn't mean pushing past what you can handle. It means understanding where your line is and honoring the fuck out of that too. So if you're going to choose courage, it's got to come from inside you, the definitions, the answers, the calls, and the response. So here are a few questions to guide you in that conversation with yourself so that ultimately, and hopefully you can be in deeper consent with your own choices.

Speaker 1: So the first question I already previewed, how do you define courage? Please don't skip this. Don't overthink it either. It doesn't need to be fancy. You can borrow my definition and start from there. You can use someone else's definition that you love and respect, but ultimately it needs to come from you in your own words and a voice that is authentic to your heart. How do you want to define courage? What does that mean in your life? The second question is why choose courage? We have gone over a very, very, very long list of particularly expensive costs that often come with courage. I've also been really clear. There's no guarantee. There's no guarantee you're going to see or reap the benefits or the goals or the outcomes that you are hoping for by an acting courage. So why the hell should you just you from your own heart, choose it anyway?

Speaker 1: And maybe the answer is you don't. I'm not totally sure. But I do think it's worth pausing to give yourself time to ask yourself why. If the stakes are so high and there's no guarantee, why would I choose something that is often by definition impossible? The rest of the questions I'm going to offer you are meant to help you a little bit more in the moment rather than existentially or big picture. So when you are at a crossroads and you need to choose courage, or you're giving yourself the opportunity to choose courage, I'm hoping some of these questions can help you. The first is, why am I choosing or not choosing courage in this moment? To have that sort of mindful clarity with yourself, to know the little lowercase WY rather than the big uppercase W, existential y. Why am I choosing or not choosing courage in this moment?

Speaker 1: Second, what parts of how I hope to live or who I hope to become? Can courage help me with in this moment? Next, what am I willing to risk and what am I not willing to risk or sacrifice? Fourth, what are my limits with courage and how will I honor them? And again, this can be in the moment or big picture. And the last two questions. If the benefits of courage never come, will I still be at peace with this particular choice? And last, final question that might help you in the moment. Where's my choice coming from? If I'm choosing courage? If I'm not choosing courage, is that coming from my integrity, my sense of values, my desire, a sense of pressure or societal expectation? Where is my source for the motivation to enact courage or not to enact courage? So these questions aren't easy, but I think they're really important since courage at its core is it's an agreement with yourself. It's saying, I choose this path knowing full well what it might cost me, and that there's no guarantee. And if you're not ready to choose courage and in a particular moment, or you are actively choosing not to choose courage in a particular moment, remember that that's okay. Not choosing courage is a choice too, and sometimes it's going to be the best choice for you.

Speaker 1: The bottom line is that courage is personal. No one can make the choice for you, no one can define it for you. And the important thing is that when you do choose it, if you do choose it, you know why you're doing it and you know that you're doing it on your own terms, there's no promise of success, there's no guaranteed happy ending. So as you move through your life, keep asking yourself, what does courage mean to me today? What does it look like in this moment? And do I choose it? For me, courage is a way of saying I'm here for the real thing. Courage invites me into a relationship with a world that's messy and painful and raw and real. And while it doesn't guarantee anything, and while it's likely going to cost a fuck ton, it does mean that you and me and all of us will likely feel more of our own life as we live it. And I think that matters a lot. Alright, friends, that's it for today. Next week, that's going to re-release an episode from four years ago about self-care and family care and organizational care during the election season. But until then, everybody, I hope you make a fuck ton of love or courage and that you're in consent about all of it. See you soon. Bye for now.