Really, Laura?

On the fear of disapproval and how it keeps us from our Bigger Yes.

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This is the third installment of our conversation about what I call The Bigger Yes, and why we turn away from it. The first reason I identified is fear of pain. Today I’m going to talk about fear of disapproval. In the coming weeks, I’ll cover the remaining three: fear of uncertainty, fear of being seen failing (actual vulnerability, not the faux kind we see so often), and the “Who am I to x, y, z?” complex.

New York Society Of Illustrators Exhibition Poster | Mark Smith Illustration

Really, Laura?

In 2011, I posted Beyoncé’s epic performance of Who Run The World (Girls) at the Billboard Awards on Facebook. I said something about how powerful she was. My dad, who is barely on Facebook, commented.

Really, Laura?

I was an adult. A new mother. Thirty-three years old. Still, my neck flushed with shame. I deleted the post.

“Really, Laura?” is the primary disapproval tape that directed my life. It’s the voice of my dad, who saw anything that carried the slightest whiff of lefty politics as stupid. It is the political lens that best summarizes his views, though the categories of his disapproval could be sliced in many ways: feminism, intellectual weakness, collective thinking, or anything he deemed to be “Oprah Culture”; much of my thinking and interests fell into this category.

I’ve learned a lot from my dad. He’s not a one-dimensional character any more than anyone else is, but the “Really, Laura?” message got in there and burrowed deep into my psyche further than any praise or shows of support ever could. Like most daughters, my dad’s approval carried a lot of weight. The implicit and explicit versions of, “Really, Laura?” shut down my instincts and shut me up.

For example, I majored in business because that’s what my dad saw as valuable. I pursued an MBA, partly because my dad loved the idea of having a daughter who got a degree from “the three B’s” (Babson, Bentley, and Bryant). I stopped reading novels for a period in my twenties because my dad said fiction was a waste of time, frivolous, for lazy minds. Etc.

In the spring of 2016, before I walked into the office to resign from my 15-year career in advertising to pursue writing, I thought, I need to tell my dad before I do this. What I meant was, I need to get my dad’s approval before I do this.

I didn’t, though. In an act of self-trust, the first of its kind, I left him out of this massive life decision.

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As I thought about this, I wondered what was different in 2016. How did I get past the fear of disapproval when for so long I couldn’t have? Here’s what I came up with.