A Clown Is Chasing You and You Stop to Google If Your Fear Is Valid

I absolutely LOVED the game “tag” when I was younger. I always felt like it could be a little more exciting though. Yes, there was always the sense of urgency, but what if there was even more? Let’s set the scene, shall we? You’re playing a friendly game of tag with your friends. You’re outside, you’re running around, somebody is probably cheating because there is ALWAYS somebody who suddenly forgets the rules the second they’re about to get tagged, and everything is perfectly normal. You’re laughing, you’re out of breath, you’re having the time of your life because apparently this was entertainment before we had iPhones and seventeen streaming services. You’re it, and you finally manage to tag someone. Huge accomplishment.

You take a second to breathe while your friend takes off after somebody else, and for a few beautiful seconds, you get to exist peacefully. Then your friend stops chasing the other person. They look at you. You look at them. They look at you again. And you know exactly what that means. Your five seconds of peace are over. So you run. You look behind you and see your friend chasing you, laughing, and you start doing that weird zigzag thing that children genuinely believe makes them impossible to catch. It does not. But you commit. You look back again. And suddenly… your friend is gone. Your other friends are gone. The playground is gone. And the person chasing you is no longer your friend. It’s a clown. A horrifying clown.

A clown with this huge, jarring smile that somehow looks less like a smile and more like a threat. It looks at you. You look at it. It tilts its head. And then it starts running. So obviously, you run. You’re sprinting. You have entered a level of athleticism that has never once appeared during gym class. Your body has decided that this is your Olympic moment. You are flying. You are jumping over things. You don’t know what you’re jumping over. You don’t care. You look behind you and the clown is still coming. And then, for some reason, your brain decides this is the perfect moment to stop and ask an important question: “Wait. Is my fear valid?” So you pull out your phone. You open Google.

You type, “How do I know if I have a valid reason to be afraid?” And now you’re standing there, actively being pursued by a clown, reading an article about emotional regulation. The clown is getting closer. You scroll. “Fear is a natural response to perceived danger.” Okay. Great. Very informative. You scroll again. “Not all fear indicates actual danger.” Oh. Okay. Maybe you’re overreacting. Maybe you should give the clown a chance. Maybe you should stop making assumptions. Maybe you should consider the clown’s perspective. And while you are having this internal TED Talk, the clown is approximately three feet away. And THAT, my friends, is where I want to take this episode.

Because let’s be honest: if you were actually being chased by a clown, you probably wouldn’t need a stranger on the internet to tell you that you’re allowed to run. You wouldn’t need to call your friend and say, “Hey, quick question, if a clown is chasing me, would you personally consider that an uncomfortable situation?” You wouldn’t need to post on Reddit asking, “Am I being dramatic for thinking this clown has bad intentions?” You wouldn’t need to conduct a survey. You wouldn’t need to make a pros and cons list. You wouldn’t need to sit down and journal about whether your fear is coming from a place of childhood conditioning. You would probably just RUN. Your body would tell you something was happening, and you would respond.

Your heart would start pounding, your breathing would change, your muscles would tense, your attention would lock onto the thing in front of you, and your brain would basically throw a giant emergency banner across the screen that says, “HELLO? SOMETHING IS HAPPENING.” And you would listen. But now imagine that the clown disappears. Same body. Same brain. Same nervous system. Same human being. Except instead of a clown, there’s a person. Maybe they say something that makes you uncomfortable. Maybe they cross a boundary. Maybe you leave a conversation feeling weird, but you can’t quite explain why. Maybe you walk into a room and immediately feel yourself tense up. Maybe someone’s behavior toward you changes and something inside you goes, “Hmm.

I don’t like this.” Maybe you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, angry, sad, anxious, or hurt. And suddenly, the way you treat that signal changes. Suddenly you don’t just listen. You interrogate yourself. “Why do I feel this way?” “Am I being dramatic?” “Would somebody else be upset about this?” “Maybe I misunderstood.” “Maybe they didn’t mean it like that.” “Maybe I’m just tired.” “Maybe I’m too sensitive.” “Maybe I should wait until somebody else tells me that this is actually a problem.” And suddenly you’re doing exactly what you did with the clown. Except this time, the clown is an emotion, and instead of running, you’re standing there asking Google whether you’re allowed to have it.

So let’s go back to our clown. Because our clown is still there. And you have somehow decided that the appropriate response to being chased is to become a forensic psychologist. You’re standing there with your phone like, “Okay, let’s gather some context.” The clown takes a step closer. You scroll. “What are common signs that a threat is legitimate?” The clown takes another step. You scroll faster. “Can fear be irrational?” Yes. Great. Fantastic. The clown is now close enough that you can probably smell whatever clown cologne it has on. And you’re thinking, “Well, technically, I don’t know the clown’s intentions.” You don’t. Maybe he’s actually just trying to make friends. Maybe he has a really aggressive communication style.

Maybe his love language is pursuit. We don’t know. But what you DO know is that your body is screaming. Your body doesn’t need a PowerPoint presentation to tell you that it doesn’t like what’s happening. And I think we laugh at this because the scenario is ridiculous, but there is something painfully familiar about it. How many times have you felt something and immediately tried to convince yourself that you shouldn’t? How many times have you needed somebody else to confirm your own experience before you trusted it? How many times have you thought, “I know I’m upset, but am I upset enough?” How many times have you been hurt and then immediately started researching whether you were justified in being hurt?

How many times have you felt uncomfortable and then spent more energy proving that you shouldn’t be uncomfortable than actually asking yourself why you were uncomfortable? We do this because external validation feels like certainty. If somebody else says, “Yes, that makes sense,” suddenly we can breathe. If somebody else says, “No, you’re not crazy,” suddenly we believe ourselves. If five people agree with us, suddenly the feeling feels legitimate. But what happens when nobody agrees? What happens when the people around you don’t understand? What happens when you can’t explain yourself perfectly? What happens when the person who hurt you doesn’t think they did anything wrong?

What happens when the situation is ambiguous and there isn’t a neat little villain standing under a spotlight saying, “Yes, I did that, and I admit it”? Are you going to decide that because you can’t prove the feeling, you don’t get to have it? Because that is where we start abandoning ourselves.

If you take anything from this episode, anything at all, I want it to be this: you don’t have to make sure that it’s okay in order to feel something. You don’t need to establish that your emotion is objectively correct before you acknowledge that you’re experiencing it. And I want to make something really clear here, because self-validation is not the same thing as automatically believing every thought that enters your head. If you feel like somebody hates you, that doesn’t automatically mean they hate you. If you feel like something terrible is going to happen, that doesn’t mean something terrible is going to happen. If you feel rejected, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve been rejected. Our brains are complicated.

Our histories affect the way we interpret things. Anxiety can make a fire alarm out of a toaster. Trauma can make old danger feel like present danger. Exhaustion can make everything feel bigger. But here’s the important part: the fact that your interpretation might be wrong does not make your emotional experience fake. You can say, “I feel afraid,” without saying, “Therefore I am definitely in danger.” You can say, “I feel hurt,” without saying, “Therefore this person intentionally hurt me.” You can say, “I feel overwhelmed,” without saying, “Therefore everything in my life is objectively too much.” You can acknowledge the signal without immediately deciding what the signal means. And that is such an important distinction.

Because maybe your fear is telling you there is something you need to pay attention to. Maybe your fear is telling you that you’re overstimulated. Maybe it’s reminding you of something from the past. Maybe it’s warning you about something in the present. Maybe it’s just an alarm going off because your nervous system is exhausted. You don’t know yet. And you don’t have to know yet. You can just listen.

If you feel something, you feel something. Point blank, period. You don’t have to wait for the permission of validation to let the emotion in. Yes, there are some emotions we’d rather keep out. Obviously. Nobody wakes up and says, “You know what would really add to my Tuesday? Grief.” But emotions aren’t punishments. They’re signals. They’re your brain and body trying to communicate with you. Sometimes the message is crystal clear. Sometimes it looks like absolute garbage handwriting. Sometimes it’s basically your nervous system writing “HELP” in the sand and then immediately erasing half the letters because it forgot what it was trying to say. But it’s still communication.

Our brains and bodies communicate with us, and sometimes we don’t listen because we don’t like the message. Sometimes we misinterpret it because we’re scared of what it might mean. Sometimes we have been taught that certain emotions are unacceptable, so we learn to suppress them before we even understand them. We learn that anger is bad, so we swallow it. We learn that sadness is inconvenient, so we hide it. We learn that fear makes us weak, so we pretend we’re not afraid. We learn that being overwhelmed means we’re failing, so we push harder. We learn that being uncomfortable means we should toughen up. And eventually, we become really good at hearing ourselves and immediately telling ourselves to shut up.

But imagine if you did that to another person. Imagine your best friend came to you and said, “Something about this situation is making me uncomfortable,” and you responded, “Well, prove it.” Imagine they said, “I feel hurt,” and you said, “Okay, but can you provide objective evidence that you are sufficiently hurt to qualify as hurt?” Imagine they said, “I’m scared,” and you said, “Well, everyone else seems fine, so maybe you’re being dramatic.” You would probably be a terrible friend. And yet we do this to ourselves constantly. We become the person who makes us provide evidence for our own pain. And I think sometimes healing is learning how to become a safer person for yourself to talk to. Not a person who agrees with everything you think.

A person who listens. A person who says, “Okay. I hear that you’re scared. Let’s figure out why.” A person who says, “I hear that you’re angry. Let’s figure out what happened.” A person who says, “I hear that you’re exhausted. Maybe we should stop.” You don’t have to obey every emotion. But you should be willing to hear it.

And this is where the psychology gets really interesting, because there is a difference between validation and agreement. Validation doesn’t necessarily mean telling yourself, “Everything I think is true.” It means acknowledging that your emotional experience is happening and that there is a reason it makes sense from your current perspective. That’s important because emotions don’t appear out of nowhere. They are influenced by what we perceive, what we’ve experienced before, what our nervous system has learned, what we believe, what our bodies are doing, and what is happening around us.

There’s also a book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker that talks extensively about fear and the ways humans can pick up on warning signals, sometimes before they consciously understand exactly what they’ve noticed. And I love bringing that into this conversation because it gives us an important middle ground. We don’t have to treat fear like a magical crystal ball, but we also don’t have to treat it like an annoying idiot that never knows what it’s talking about. Your nervous system is constantly taking in information. Facial expressions. Tone. Body language. Environment. Patterns. Memories. Context. Physical sensations. And sometimes your conscious brain catches up later.

But anxiety complicates this because the alarm system can also become overly sensitive. You can have a nervous system that says, “RED ALERT,” when somebody sends you a text that simply says, “Okay.” And now you’re sitting there thinking, “Oh my God. They hate me.” They could literally be at work. But your brain has already written the sequel, the prequel, and the director’s commentary. So self-validation has to coexist with reality-testing. You can say, “I feel rejected,” and then ask, “What evidence do I actually have?” You can say, “I feel unsafe,” and ask, “Is there something happening right now that I need to respond to?” You can say, “I’m overwhelmed,” and ask, “What can I reduce?” The goal isn’t to silence the alarm or blindly obey it.

It’s to become fluent enough in your own emotional language that you can understand what the alarm is trying to communicate. That’s emotional awareness. That’s self-trust. That’s learning that your internal world isn’t an enemy that constantly needs to be corrected. It’s information that needs to be understood.

And now let’s go back to the clown. Because at the beginning of this episode, the joke was that you were being chased by a clown and somehow decided to stop and Google whether your fear was valid. But maybe the funniest part isn’t that you’re being chased by the clown. Maybe it’s that you’ve been doing the exact same thing with yourself for years. The clown is running toward you, and you’re standing there asking Google for permission to run. You’re looking for an external authority to confirm what your body already knows: “Something about this is making me uncomfortable, and I need to pay attention.” And maybe the real lesson isn’t “always trust your fear.”

Maybe it’s “don’t abandon yourself while you’re figuring out whether your fear is telling the truth.” That’s a completely different message. Because sometimes your fear is right. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes your anxiety is picking up on something important. Sometimes it is taking an innocent situation and setting it on fire for dramatic effect. Sometimes your anger is pointing directly at a boundary. Sometimes you’re just hungry. Sometimes you’re exhausted. Sometimes you need to sleep before you send that paragraph. Please sleep before you send the paragraph. But in every single one of those situations, you can still listen to yourself. You can say, “Something is happening inside me.” Then you can investigate. That’s the part I think we forget.

We think self-validation means agreeing with ourselves. It doesn’t. It means being willing to hear ourselves. If I tell you I’m scared, you don’t have to say, “Yes, the thing you’re afraid of is definitely dangerous.” You can say, “I believe that you’re scared. Let’s figure out what’s happening.” That’s what we can learn to do for ourselves. “I believe you’re hurt. Let’s figure out why.” “I believe you’re overwhelmed. Let’s see what we can take off your plate.” “I believe you’re angry. Let’s see what boundary might have been crossed.” “I believe you’re anxious. Let’s breathe and then figure out what is actually happening.” That is so much gentler than immediately saying, “You’re fine.” And sometimes “you’re fine” is the exact opposite of what we need.

Maybe we’re not fine. Maybe we just need to know that we don’t have to be fine before we’re worthy of care.

You don’t need someone else to confirm that something hurt before you are allowed to take care of the part of you that hurts.

So here’s what I want you to do this week. The next time you have a strong emotional reaction, I don’t want you to immediately fix it, explain it, defend it, Google it, text your best friend about it, or put it on trial. I want you to pause. Just pause. And ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now?” Not “Why am I being like this?” Not “Is this reasonable?” Not “Would someone else feel this way?” Just, “What am I feeling?” Then ask, “What might this feeling be trying to tell me?” And then, if you still don’t know, that’s okay. You can literally say, “I don’t know yet.” That’s allowed. You can sit with yourself without immediately demanding an answer. And maybe you’ll realize you’re angry because somebody crossed a boundary.

Maybe you’ll realize you’re anxious because you’re exhausted. Maybe you’ll realize you’re sad because you’re grieving something you never gave yourself permission to grieve. Maybe you’ll realize you’re afraid because something genuinely needs your attention. Maybe you’ll realize your fear was a false alarm. Maybe you’ll realize you need more information before you make a decision. Whatever you discover, the important part is that you listened before you outsourced the entire experience. You don’t need to become your own therapist overnight. You don’t need to perfectly understand your nervous system. You don’t need to become some emotionally enlightened monk who calmly observes every feeling while drinking tea in a field.

Sometimes you’re going to lose your mind because somebody used the wrong tone in a text message. That’s okay. You’re human. The goal is not perfection. The goal is relationship. Your relationship with yourself. Because if you spend your entire life waiting for somebody else to tell you what you’re allowed to feel, you’re going to spend a lot of your life standing next to your own emotions instead of actually experiencing them. And I don’t want that for you. I want you to be able to say, “I’m scared,” without immediately adding, “but maybe I’m being dramatic.” I want you to be able to say, “I’m hurt,” without immediately adding, “but it’s probably not a big deal.” I want you to be able to say, “I’m exhausted,” without immediately calling yourself lazy.

I want you to be able to say, “I don’t like this,” without needing a committee vote. And I want you to be able to say, “I don’t know if this feeling is telling me the complete truth, but I know it’s telling me something.” Because that’s the middle ground. That’s where self-trust lives. You don’t have to believe every thought. You don’t have to obey every emotion. You don’t have to assume every fear is a prophecy. You just have to stop treating yourself like a witness whose testimony doesn’t count. So the next time your internal clown starts chasing you, please don’t stand there with your phone asking Google whether you’re allowed to run. Listen. Look around. Gather information. Take care of yourself. And if you need to leave, leave.

If you need to breathe, breathe. If you need to ask for help, ask. If you need more information, get it. If you realize you were wrong, you can adjust. But don’t make yourself prove that you deserve to listen to yourself. Because your feelings don’t have to be perfectly accurate to deserve your attention. They just have to be there. And maybe that’s what being Made of More actually means sometimes. Not becoming some stronger, tougher, more emotionless version of yourself. Maybe it means becoming someone who can hear herself. Someone who doesn’t immediately abandon herself the second an emotion becomes inconvenient. Someone who can look inward and say, “Okay. I hear you.

I don’t know exactly what this means yet, but I’m not going to leave you alone with it.” And honestly, if that’s the only thing you take from this episode, take that. Because maybe you don’t need more validation. Maybe you need more permission to listen to the person who’s been with you this entire time. You.