Editor’s Note: This post is part of a 28 day blogging challenge from Imperfectblogging.com. The goal is to develop your blogging voice. To learn more, click here. 

Have you ever seen the movies where people confess to a crime right before something big happens? It’s one of those trademark things that always happens in big blockbuster movies with explosions and such.

Well, there’s a reason those confessions happen before the big BOOM. Confessions are BIG and SCARY and well, draped in all kinds of truth.

Yesterday, I wrote about truth in S.E.L.F as part of the 28 days of imperfect blogging. Today, I write about confessions and I tell you one of my secrets. Here goes…

I am afraid of success.

Shocked? When I came to that conclusion, I was as well. But it seems that I’ve always been afraid of success. Here’s a video of me talking about being accepted and about to start one of the best chapters of my life — grad school.

Yup. Fear. It was written all over my face at the time.

While some folks fear and run from failure, I embrace it. I love failing. That means there’s more work to do. But success? At one time, it meant suffocating. As a result, I’d sabotage myself in so many different little ways. I didn’t want that bomb to explode, I guess.

About three years ago, I got the best advice, however, from a business woman at a convention I was at. My fear of success wasn’t about the success part, she said. It is a deeper issue, something you need to meditate on.

She was right. I wasn’t afraid of success. I was afraid of being done. If I was wildly successful, then what? What do I do with myself? If I write a book that everyone LOVED, how can I write the next book?

As a writer, something like that can block your creative juices for a while. But I realized that success wasn’t about other people, it was about me. I determine what is successful and what it looks like. I determine what the next step to my path is.

The secret to confessions is that you have to be true to yourself. Only by being truthful can you do the work worth doing.

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For writers, that’s a lot of heavy lifting. But it’s also great material for the page.

Now, it’s your turn. What’s your confession?