Notes for Myself When I'm Too Afraid to Move
Fear is the mindkiller.
It's okay to be afraid, it means you have something to live for.
Alicia D'Aversa
Fear has defined so much of my life. One of my first memories is of being at the Oklahoma Zoo and looking down into the hippo pen. My mother told me to be careful, because a boy had fallen in and was swallowed up. I was too young to understand what it meant to die but I understood what it meant to be eaten. I spent most of my childhood afraid of rattlesnakes, and strangers, my own reflection, the pinch of fat on my stomach, getting lost, being abandoned, the tremble in my own voice, angles where I could be seen but not seen.
I’ve worked a lot on managing my fear but if I slip a little, If I glance away for just a moment, it can all come flooding back in a crushing wave of paralysis, bringing with it the haunted bones of my childhood, transforming my face into the rictus of a terrified doll. Maybe I'll always have to contend with feeling as if my nightmares are more real than waking life, because the twisted dream logic of a world that always presents to me my worst fears seems more realistic than daring to hope for the best.
Still, dare to hope we must. Here are some notes I wrote for myself to contend with the fear when it becomes overwhelming.
Death is everywhere you look. You're not imagining it. Everything is coming to an end and there's little of you that can be preserved. Only fools are unafraid of looking over the stretched rim of life, down into the deep and sparkling well where nothing resides.
Recognize that you have a good reason to be afraid, because you have been designed to be a fearful creature. You are spit, and adrenaline, and nerve endings, and eyes that catch the slightest movement in the periphery. Your most base instinct is to chase life at the expense of everything else.
Nothing in this reality is without consequences. You pay for everything, there is no way around it. What costs the most to a human being is living a life they never wanted because they were too afraid to dream of anything else.
Sometimes when I'm afraid I have to remind myself that I'm often afraid of the wrong thing. Oftentimes the price of inaction has a much more potential horrible outcome than doing whatever it is I'm afraid of.
Fear tastes like metal and blood and salt, like a ball of sweat that's been rolled through a frozen shadow. Recognize the taste, because sometimes you try to convince yourself your choices have been made not from fear, but desire.
Being a neurotic means that I see danger everywhere. Sometimes I become so obsessed with the fear that I lose sight of the sky and the trees, the color that imbues everything, the joy that seeps into each moment if only I would allow it.
I used to dream of demons tearing me apart, until I started to laugh and dance in their presence. Then they shed their black shadow skin and their carnivorous teeth and became giggling little children.
All new knowledge is precipitated by fear. Fear is the needle that injects each new perspective into your brain. The mind above all resists change. It howls, terrified of it, and often becomes furious when confronted with it.
I often wonder what it'd be like to be eaten by a bear. I feel it's paw on my head, pinning me to the earth, spine crushed, paralyzed but feeling as my organs are pulled out of me. The ground is frozen and my pink insides are frothy with steam. It seems an unimaginably cruel way to die, and yet, so common and ordinary. It doesn't matter what plans I have for my life or what I try to avoid, all cruelties I'm confronted with must be endured.
All pain becomes dull in memory. All pain is bearable because it soon fades.
If I become devastated and terrified at the thought of losing something, it means that something is worth keeping. It doesn't mean I need to figure out how to live without it.
Every fear avoided just makes your world a little smaller.
I didn't develop a fear of heights until my late twenties. It was as if suddenly my brain has fully matured and I became aware of a danger that was always prescient. I used to climb trees and telephone poles, traipsing in strange backyards in the dark, behind gas stations and down alleyways. I feel like I was a little babbling lamb at the mouth of a dragons cave, and now I'm a lot more cautious, although I'm not sure if that's improved my life significantly.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, and every promise can be broken.
Having a child is a special new kind of fear. Before I was just afraid of dying. But if your family died, it would be like dying forever, every piece of you extinguished.
Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt not because God is cruel, but that if we turn back, fearful and hesitant, scared to move forward, stuck in the past, blind to destruction, the world will kill us.
Fear really is the mind killer. It is the little death. To give in to fear is to die over and over and over again until your soul is so small that it couldn't be scraped off the pavement.
Fear and excitement are twins. You can even teach yourself to enjoy that metallic taste in your mouth, the twinge in your stomach, because it means you're about to experience something new and important.
Hell is real and demons are real and it's the result of giving in to your worst impulses, to entertain a perverse kind of misery, to give in to entropy and fall and fall into suffering because the fear of hope is just too great for you to endure.
One of fears greatest tricks is getting you to hurt yourself to try to avoid the thing you're afraid of. It's a corrupting brain virus.
I have to remember that I’ve gotten through worse than this. I have continued to endure in the obliterating scream of fear, day after day, even through the mornings when I woke up and thought I couldn’t possibly go on. Until I’m dead there will still be moments where I can laugh.
I have to believe that there’s more than this. I have to believe I can have a life that isn’t ruled by fear. I have to believe that one day I’ll get everything I want, fear winking on my shoulder like a little fairy, instead of the enduring and eternal maw of a monster that meets me at every choice.
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