What Do We Really Mean When We Talk About Bravery?

And what my six year-old son has to say about it

When I get lit up on an idea, there’s typically an easy and obvious correlation to what flipped the switch. There’s an article, a personal experience, a client session, a conversation that sets the current flowing.

Something will strike my fancy and I’ll sit with it. Stand, sleep, walk, run with it. I’ll open it up to the universe to send me what it’s got—a casting call for supportive data—and it always generously provides.

These last couple weeks, though, I’ve been working a particular puzzle, seemingly borne of nothing and everything all at once—a kerplunk of a question that fell like an apple in an open field. As if from nowhere, but immediately identifiable. I know this fleshy, roundish thing, I even eat one most days of my life, but… why now? Why here??

I’ve been thinking about bravery.

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I’ve been called brave with surprising regularity throughout my life. Surprising because I don’t consider myself a risk-taker by any means, nor do I believe I’ve done anything particularly unique, inspiring or record-setting.

It’s generally come up in sequential alignment with some big pivots I’ve made, though, leaving big commitments behind in favor of bigger ones. (read/share/❤️ Quitting Can Be an Act of Generosity)

So, I guess it’s about my choices then? That’s cool. But… I can’t help feeling a certain ickiness too, a near injury through passive insult. It’s a indisputable Virtue with a capital ‘v’ though, right? As in, throughout history, culture, across all known religions, etc.?

Why then, does it feel like being complimented for arriving at the dentist on time?

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Here’s one big, juicy apple bite of an example…

Around six months after receiving my second cancer diagnosis, in the early spring weeks of 2021, I made what was then a purpose driven decision to revive my self-suspended Instagram account. I was keyed up, and still am, about the failures of our (American) health care system, and about sharing what I thought was crucial information on preventing and healing from breast cancer.

I wanted to tell my story, not for the support of strangers or for the validation of accumulating likes, but in service and because my gut told me to. If there was one person who could benefit from some of the (now embarrassingly saccharine) details I posted, it was worth the hard pill of restarting my tolerate/hate relationship with social media.¹

The whole thing left a nasty taste in my mouth, like the horsiest of horse-pills. But not just because the whole social-media-is-devouring-humanity thing, which I fully agree with, but because I fairly regularly received a comment so cringe-inducing, so discordant with my sense of self, that it seemed to render my intentions totally obsolete.

‘You’re so brave.’

(Deep breath, clears throat, shifts uncomfortably) Brave? For what exactly?

Brave for choosing to stay alive as long as possible? Brave for publicly talking about how and why and what the fuck?

And also this intimation too, that I was brave because… honesty. And that was just supremely depressing to me.

Is honesty such a rarity these days that we’re mislabeling it as courage??

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Bravery, as a noun, is itself a brave behavior or act.

Brave, as an adjective, describes showing no fear of dangerous or difficult things.

This all tracks for me, and not just because I’m beholden to the Cambridge Dictionary. It tracks because of the more historical usage of the word, the lifespan of it; that which describes acts of fearlessness in the face of extreme chaos, distress, violence, threat.

Bravery is the stuff of heroes, thrill-seekers and the supremely ‘successful;’ ordinary and extraordinary folks alike, who, due to some congenital capability, are able to disregard their terror in a situation that demands taking tremendous risk.

I am not at all without fear, trust me. Not generally, not acutely. I’m plenty scared of dying from cancer, and think about it more often than not. I fear spiders, the unknown edges of space, and any kind of horror movie that involves basements, attics and/or locked doors.

But there’s a tricky thing here, about showing versus feeling fear. Do we label someone as brave, or a thing they do as an act of bravery, because they don’t possess fear, or because they don’t show it? Does it even matter?

I think it kinda does, because what others may admire in me as bravery, as a lack of fear, actually feels to me like something totally different.

It feels like, preparedness.

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So, we’re watching Novak Djokovich ruthlessly pound Rafael Nadal in the second round of mens single’s play this last week—olympics addicts, the lot of us—and our youngest says, announces really:

‘He looks scared.’

‘Nadal?’ I ask, which seems improbable because everyone knows he’s actually an alien sent from another dimension to reteach us all Stoicism.

‘No. That other guy.’

Huh. Giving a harder assessment of Djokovich’s game face, he does indeed look a little… freaked. Not in a panicked, disbelieving, ‘what fresh hell is this’ sorta way, but yet—the kid’s right. He looks just slightly left of confident.

‘He does, Link, but prepared too. Scared but prepared. Right?’

‘Yeah! Scared but prepared!’

Yep. That’s bravery in my book.

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I reckon we call each other brave, as I was labelled for my truly inconsequential IG posts, because we doubt our own ability to rise to a challenge in the same way others have.

Being labelled as courageous for my honesty around a circumstance of my life I didn’t choose is obviously about more than just a reel about the gargantuan size of my lunch salads—it’s a signal to those cruising along in comfy disregard of their health that they may be a lot closer to the cliff’s edge than they think.

Being called out for my bravery felt like a misrepresentation of my challenge, however, a disrespect of the very real fear I’ve worked exceedingly hard to push through. And in digging deeper, seems to me that bravery, both as an act and as a virtue, is admired exactly because of what I believe is a general unfamiliarity with the level of self mastery involved.

Is our borderline worship of bravery because of our disconnect with living a virtuous life?? We tend to think that those whom show bravery do so with a complete lack of fear or trepidation… but that’s the show of it. Not the doing of it.

How do we even know someone literally possesses zero fear when they’re acting brave anyway? One can avoid showing any damn thing while still feeling it. Doing, beyond the feeling, beyond and above the emotion, is all about the relationship between vulnerability and confidence… and confidence, perhaps the most misunderstood of virtues, comes from preparation.

The doing of bravery is methodical. It’s repetition. It’s the building of a skill just as any other. Acknowledging your fear, calling it out, bringing it forward… yes, being honest.

“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.” - Brené Brown

That’s the work, and it’s hard as fuck. Google how to build courage, aka bravery, and you’ll get a redundancy of results, all pointing toward the same basic protocol: knowledge begets capability which breeds confidence which leads to preparedness which culminates in… bravery.

I understand better now why I felt so hurt by what others meant as one of the greatest compliments you can offer. I felt like my hard work—learning, planning and taking action, over and over again—had been relegated to the last bit of Brené’s brilliant definition without any of the first. All show and no do.

Yes. I’ve done brave things, and so have you. The more honest we are about what bravery really means, with each other and with ourselves, the less of a rarity it will seem. The less of a rarity it will be.

1. My small time cancer influencer career didn’t last long. I left IG again last year (For good this time. Don’t call, don’t text, I fucking mean it!!).