How Fear Nearly Cost Me My Favorite Region on Earth
I almost didn’t go.
Let me be honest about that. When Turkey first came up — when the idea of actually getting on a plane and flying to a country I had categorized in my mind as Middle Eastern, dangerous, absolutely not — my answer was immediate and instinctive. No. Not a chance. Why would anyone willingly go there?
A former friend of mine was the first person who ever mentioned it. He said he wanted to visit Turkey, and I remember looking at him like he’d suggested we vacation on the surface of the sun. Turkey? Why? I couldn’t even articulate what I was afraid of. I just knew — the way you know things you’ve never examined — that Turkey was somewhere I wasn’t prioritizing.
That knowing was fear. And fear, left unexamined, will build a wall around your entire life and convince you it’s a window.
My sister changed everything.
She wanted to go. Not casually — she was persistent. She had Turkey and Israel on her list, and she wasn’t interested in my excuses. She didn’t argue with my fear or try to dismantle it with logic. She just kept saying let’s do it. And eventually, the weight of her certainty became heavier than the weight of my resistance.
So I went. Not because the fear was gone. Because someone I trusted made the leap feel survivable. And that’s a distinction worth sitting with — because most people are waiting for the fear to disappear before they act. It doesn’t disappear. It gets overruled. By a person, by a decision, by a moment where you realize that the cost of saying no one more time is higher than the cost of saying yes.
I think about what would have happened if I didn’t have her. If no one in my life had pushed. If I’d been left alone with my fear and my assumptions and my secondhand ideas about a region I’d never set foot in. I’d have stayed home. Comfortably. Safely. And I would have missed the single most transformative chapter of my life.
If you don’t have someone like that — someone who challenges your limits instead of coddling them — you need to find that person. Or you need to become that person for yourself. Because fear doesn’t need a partner to thrive. It will happily run your life solo.
Turkey itself was a revelation. Not in the way you expect when you’ve spent years imagining danger. It was warm. It was vibrant. It was the kind of place where you sit down at a table and realize that the world is so much larger and kinder and more interesting than the version of it you built inside your head.
I’ve been back twice now. I plan to go again. It’s become one of those places I return to the way you return to a conversation you’re not finished having — there’s always something left. Something you missed. Some corner you didn’t turn, some flavor you didn’t try, some interaction that reminds you that your comfort zone was never protecting you. It was just keeping you small.
But Turkey’s real gift wasn’t Turkey itself. It was the door it opened.
Because once I went to Turkey, Israel became possible. My sister had that one on her list too, and the fear that would have stopped me cold six months earlier had already been cracked open. So we went. And Israel rearranged my understanding of history, spirituality, and what it means to stand in a place where the weight of human experience is so heavy you can feel it pressing against your skin.
And once Israel happened, I took over. The fear wasn’t just cracked anymore — it was gone. Replaced by something I can only describe as hunger. I wanted more. I wanted all of it.
Bahrain. Kuwait. Qatar. The UAE. Oman. Jordan. Saudi Arabia. Egypt. One after another, each country peeling back another layer of the assumptions I’d carried my entire life without ever questioning them. Each one teaching me something I couldn’t have learned from a book, a documentary, or someone else’s travel blog.
Some of my biggest personal growth moments happened in the Middle East. The region I was most afraid of became the region that changed me the most. And that’s not irony — that’s the principle.
Proverbs 29:25 says: “Fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.”
I read that differently now. The snare isn’t physical danger. The snare is the trap of living according to fear — fear of the unknown, fear of what others might think, fear of places and people and experiences that don’t fit inside the small, tidy box you’ve built for your life. The snare is the life you never live because you were too afraid to book the flight.
Seneca wrote: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Every fear I had about Turkey — every one — was imagined. Constructed from headlines, stereotypes, and the comfortable ignorance of a person who had never been there. The reality was so far from the imagination that it was almost embarrassing. And that gap — between what I feared and what I found — is the gap where most people’s unlived lives exist.
Marcus Aurelius said: “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
Turkey was the beginning. Not of travel — I’d traveled before. But of the kind of travel that dismantles you. The kind that forces you to confront the fact that your worldview was built on assumptions you never verified. The kind that makes you realize your fear was never protecting you from danger. It was protecting you from growth.
I almost didn’t go. My favorite region on earth — the collection of countries and experiences and moments of personal transformation that have shaped who I am more than almost anything else — nearly didn’t happen because I was afraid of a place I’d never been.
That’s what fear does. It doesn’t just stop you from going to Turkey. It stops you from discovering that Turkey was the doorway to everything that came after. It doesn’t just prevent one experience — it prevents the cascade of experiences that follows when you break through.
Your wildest dreams are on the other side of the thing you’re most afraid of. Not always. But often enough that the pattern should terrify you more than the fear itself.
What’s your Turkey?
What’s the thing you’ve been saying no to — instinctively, reflexively, without ever examining why — that might be the door to a version of your life you can’t even imagine from where you’re standing?
Go find out.
Your sister might not be there to push you. So push yourself.
The fear will still be there when you board the plane. Board it anyway.