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| Actively worried |
Are we meant to get more or less afraid as we get older? On
one hand we’ve got more experience so know that things we might have
irrationally feared as children (the dark, those weird Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp) are no longer cause for concern. But on the other hand the
more we experience the more we learn what to logically avoid – all the cuts and
bruises we lump around with us and label as emotional baggage are reminders
that serve to make us afraid. They’re the lessons we’ve chosen to learn from
the worst of times – key word here is chosen,
sometimes we elect to learn lessons that are easy, rather than the more
difficult ones that might prove genuinely helpful. For example, I believed that
if I swore off dating science students my relationships might be more
successful (lol), when the lesson I really needed to learn was not to choose
men who saw me as utterly disposable. I’m still trying to learn this lesson
properly, (it’s PhD length) and yet this is my biggest gaping scar – my greatest
fear is being deserted for no reason. Because I haven’t learnt how to avoid
these kinds of situations the fear isn’t measured and it so doesn’t fulfil its
function as self-defence. Instead it crops up at weird times, often when it’s
already too late and consumes my thought process. I think being the age that we
are is terrifying because we’re full of these half-learned lessons
that don’t quite protect us from making the same mistakes, yet don’t quite allow
us to enjoy the process of making said mistake as much as we used to. Sigh.
Last week I was in the middle of one of my periodic anxiety meltdowns, these aren’t triggered by anything, just kinda happens but it has honestly been absolute hell. To cheer me up my pal Tim took me to an amateur open mic night – show tunes and a bottle of wine, ideal for curing the blues. Now I’m a great believer in things happening for a reason (see my domino effect post here); being in the right place at the right time, seeing something happen, hearing something – these important moments happen, whether you believe in fate or whatever, there are undeniably times when you know something important has been offered to you. About an hour into the night the most sparkly man I’ve ever seen took to the stage with a rendition of ‘I’m Not Afraid of Anything’ from a musical called Songs for a New World. I’d never heard this song before this night, the video with audio is below but in case you can’t be arsed to listen it’s a song about lack of fear and not understanding why other people are afraid of irrational things – ‘Jenny’s afraid of water, / I mean she swims so well but still, / She’s afraid of water’.
Watching that sparkly man sing his heart out took me right
back to a time when I felt absolutely and totally unafraid – May week last year.
I was unafraid because I had nothing except whatever I was holding right there in
my hands at the time. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. The reason
I’m capable of feeling more fear nowadays is because I have things that I don’t
want to lose – I’ve started to build pieces of a life that might be more
permanent than a few weeks, and if it’s ripped out from underneath me what will
I do? Yep, I’m afraid that it’s all going to crumble and that I’ll be stuck in
the rubble when it falls. But you know what I’m not afraid of? Being afraid. I
mean, I don’t enjoy it, but when I’m scared I refuse to be ashamed, I refuse to
employ shitty diversionary tactics, I proudly claim my right to cry and scream
and let my ugly, raw honesty spill all over the floor.
I’m scared I’ll be unemployed, that I’ll have to sack it all
in and go home. I’m absolutely terrified that one day someone is going to kick me
so hard emotionally that I won’t be able to breathe, and the worst thing about
it will be that I’ll get up and ask for more, never learning my lesson. Being
scared doesn’t make me special, and knowing this is key – I get on with my
everyday life, because I know we’re all secretly shitting our pants. I think if
there’s something that you don’t want to do, something you’re pushing away or
putting off then we should teach ourselves to look at it in terms of fear. More
often than not fear of something is at the root of these problems, and once we bring
ourselves look this fear in the eye, it might not get less scary, but it will offer
you an opportunity to handle things with honesty and (dare I say it) nobility.
