Surrender, Dorothy

On Fear

I expected the panel to be difficult. Its theme: advocacy, activism and social fatigue. The discussion? How to keep people engaged in your cause in the face of so many causes, so much pain. People get tired of investing that energy. Someone said the average person used to have 20 friends -- now she has 200. To be bombarded with the hopes and fears of 200 people is overwhelming.

We humans have our limits. Compassion can have limits.

I sat there alternately feeling my body grow hot then cold as it raced through my typical gamut of emotions. My former therapist, who is into evolutionary psychology, told me that anxiety or boredom or fatigue is a sign that I'm repressing a deeper, more primal emotion: fear, anger, love, lust, pain, pride. Usually within ten minutes of getting bad news, my eyelids are so heavy I can barely stay awake. Then my stomach hurts. Then my mind wanders. If I allow myself to just feel the real emotion without assigning it any morality, the others soon fade away. (Editor's Note: Try this for eating disorders.)

This does work, by the way. Raw anger, untouched fear -- these are not paralyzing emotions like guilt, anxiety, self-hatred. Primal emotions get you problem-solving before you realize you're already two blocks down the street. You don't sit around and eat chocolate when you're Godfather-level mad. You plot, you plan, you seethe, you destroy a pillow. You don't mope. You don't cry. The trick is to feel the emotion without necessarily acting on it. You don't really want to bean the guy who cut you off in traffic with a shovel. But it's human -- and rather harmless -- to imagine it and then decide it's not in your best interest to really do it. Humans want to dominate the world around us. It's an occupational hazard we all share. It requires a fancy trick to be able to view your amygdala like it is television. It's hard. I admit that when I first heard this theory, I thought my therapist might indeed by batshit crazy.

I was trying to identify the emotion at the bottom of the guck I was feeling when my friend Anissa Mayhew, who has had a kid with cancer topped off by a few strokes and a wheelchair, told a story about falling down when nobody else was around. She said something to the extent of "And so I went to my therapist, and I said, 'I've fallen down, and now I need you to teach me to get back up.'"

And then I recognized it: Fear.

I immediately started crying, repressing the emotion as fast as I could realize what it was.

And then I let myself feel it -- the coldness, the palm-tingling, the accelerated breathing. I am afraid, as well, of falling down alone. Physically. Mentally. Spiritually.

I forced a deep breath. That's another thing I've learned -- we humans breathe very shallowly in times of intense stress. A deep breath can literally make you more sane instantly by flooding your brain with oxygen.

My response to fear is typically fight or flight, just like everyone else. But when you're afraid of something that hasn't happened, that might never happen, there is nothing to fight, nothing to run away from. I imagined running away anyway, just because it felt good, but then I realized there is nothing to run away from when you fear the unknown. There is no point at all to that fear.

Fear of the unknown? There is nothing to run away from.

 

 

 

What Would It Be Like to Live a Day Without My Greatest Fear?

My greatest fear is not being remembered.

It's why I write. It's why I publish. But frankly, it is exhausting.

It is exhausting to worry that just being me isn't enough to leave a memory. Am I so boring in person that my family wouldn't recall a joke, a smile, the fact that I won't get out of bed in the morning? Wouldn't they remember I played the King of the Rats when I was in the school production of The Pied Piper of Hamlin because I was the only one who used a special, extra-rat-like voice when I auditioned?

Don't I believe in people -- in my friends, in the readers of this blog -- that they would remember me if I missed a week? That they would know that I was still there even if I forgot the text or the phone call or the post?

To live a day without this fear, I need to trust that the people who know me, who like me, who read me, will come back even if I miss a week or hit a boring spell, because they will remember that once -- once -- I said something interesting.

I don't know why I have such arrogance that I want so to be remembered. But like the photographer who misses the fireworks trying to get the shot, sometimes I miss the moment because I'm writing it in my head as it plays out.

Because I'm afraid that I -- or they -- won't remember it.

(Editor's Note: This post was written from a writing prompt given at Blissdom conference this week. The prompt: What is your greatest fear? What would it be like to live a day without it?)

What a Box of Postcards Doesn't Tell You

The postcards came about every six months. They always ended the same -- I love you, Gran. Gran used a straight edge under her pen when she wrote and made that part of her signature: Gran______ . I thought it looked classy.

Everything about Gran seemed classy. She wore her gold and diamond jewelry in the shower, in the swimming pool, to bed. She kept the costume pieces in velvet boxes and little baggies labeled with typewritten descriptions of the piece, who had given it to her and when.

Ma would hand me the postcards when we picked up the mail at the end of our long, gravel driveway, often in the blistering heat of an Iowa summer. They'd reflect somewhere exotic, foreign stamps, exquisite cathedrals.

Gran had a roll of address labels for me: Miss Rita Jane (retracted). Even though the postcards started coming shortly after I was born, I was always Miss Rita Jane to Gran and the U.S. Postal Service.

I haven't had the opportunity for much exotic travel yet -- perhaps I will -- Gran didn't start taking her PanAm flights around the world until her children were grown -- so my memories have to be set down a little more carefully. I don't have a postcard, I'm not a great photographer -- all I have to capture the moment is my words.

I never really heard the stories behind the postcards -- Gran died when I was a senior in high school -- so now I look back and wonder why she chose to share one sentence about the honeycomb architecture of a building with a four-year-old. Who did she meet? Was she happy? What did she like so much about traveling? Was she lonely? What prompted her to wander so?

I don't know if I'll be able to leave behind fabulous jewelry or postcards from world travel, but I do know this: My daughter will never wonder what I was thinking.

Good or bad, I'll never be an enigma.