The Muscle I Didn't Know I Was Building

By Ceci Ellis

My first time holding Skye, a red-ailed hawk from Liberty Wildlife

I started volunteering at Liberty Wildlife because I was afraid of birds. Not a mild discomfort, a real fear, the kind I'll happily blame on Alfred Hitchcock and nobody else. Nine years later, that fear is gone, and somewhere along the way it took my fear of reptiles, insects, and arachnids down with it. I've told that story before. What I didn't realize until recently is that facing that fear did something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with birds at all.

Harley was a good example of what I mean by facing things head-on instead of avoiding them. He was my gateway snake, the one who made me realize I didn't just tolerate snakes now, I actually loved them. Super cute, about as chill as an animal gets, nothing like the version of "snake" that lived in my head before I ever held one. Harley passed away about a month ago, and it still catches me a little, missing an animal I once would have crossed the street to avoid. What he actually left me with was bigger than just getting comfortable with one snake. He taught me to see the beauty in reptiles generally, and how different their personalities can be from one another. We have a new hognose now, name still TBD, and she's cute in her own way, a little spicy when you first pick her up, nothing like Harley's easygoing nature. If I'd stayed away because of what I assumed a snake would be like, I'd have missed both of them completely. That's the thing about fear built on assumption instead of experience: it only survives as long as you don't actually check it against something real.

What I didn't expect was that showing up scared, over and over, until the fear wore down, would turn into a skill I could use somewhere else entirely.

Harley the Western Hog-nosed snake, also from Liberty Wildlife

For years I never submitted anything I wrote. Not because I didn't have things to submit, I did, but because putting my writing in front of someone who could say no felt like its own version of walking into an aviary for the first time. My husband is the one who finally pushed me to actually pitch something instead of just writing it and letting it sit. That push led to my first published articles. It wasn't a talent I suddenly developed. It was the exact same muscle I'd already been building at Liberty for years, just pointed at a different fear.

That muscle showed up again later, when he read through A Ghost Like Me and told me flatly that it was publication worthy. I believed the writing was fine. I did not, on my own, believe I was ready to treat it like something worth actually sending out into the world. The manuscript is in editorial development now, with an agent search on the horizon once that's done, which is its own new flavor of the same fear, one query letter away from another aviary door.

I don't think courage is really about becoming fearless. Nine years in, I'm not fearless, I've just gotten a lot more practiced at moving forward while afraid. The fear that got me through the aviary door the first time is the same fear that eventually got a manuscript into an editor's inbox, and it's the same fear waiting for me on the other side of a query letter too. Different rooms, same door.