About Fear
“We suffer more in our imagination than in reality.”
I read this line recently during one of my fearful moments - one of those moments that can turn into days, weeks, years that vary in degrees. Where does this Fear come from? I am forever searching for the stillness to ward it off, trying to tame the everyday chaos of Fear.
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My mom used to pull up in front of the market, hand me a five and say “run in and get a gallon of milk, won’t you?” And I was like, “Um, no.”
Paralyzing Fear at age 13 - How do you separate from that, what are the steps?
First - get out of the car.
Walk through the doors - find the milk, make way back to the front of the store, put it on the conveyor belt, hand the cashier money, take the change and say thank you.
I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it if someone were to talk to me. What if I couldn’t find the milk, where is it kept? What if I dropped it and it exploded?
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Dad always said “every time you leave the house, have your id on you - never walk the same way every day - change your routine.” This remains a truth in my head as I choose my route and time each day, to avoid muggings, rapists and stalkers.
On a 6am walk along the back shore recently a car approached, slowed, and the man driving made eye contact. I muted my music and reached in my pocket to get the mace ready - the mace that wasn’t there - because I’d forgotten it again. He was looking right at me, I knew I didn’t know him, I didn’t know the car. Maybe I did know it, know him, maybe it was the one that’s been following me home the other night, or the guy in aisle 8 at the market, and aisle 5 and 3 and in produce.
Possibilities of threat ran through my brain in the following seconds as the car slowed more, and more and more…
The man raised his coffee up in a toast, winked, and kept driving.
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I am aware that while there can be misunderstandings in the world, there are some people who are inherently dishonest, shady, or just flat out bad intentioned.
As a young professional, commuting on the T from a suburb of Boston in a too short suit skirt and heels, not once did I have an issue on the T, or walking the dark path home from the station each night.
In the office? That’s another story. I was 24 when I reported once to my manager that just a few minutes before I’d been grabbed from behind by a male staffer - he even BIT my neck while groping me. It was a split second but it felt like an hour. He was terminated and I didn’t feel the least bit bad about it. His wife worked there, she came to my office and cried and asked for forgiveness and to retract my complaint, but all I did was stare at her and list the things I did NOT report from prior weeks. I felt fear then. I felt fear that he would do it again, that my colleagues would look at me differently, that I would be treated unfairly. I quit not long after that for a more professional environment. At least there, nobody touched me other than a quick pat on the ass.
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I owned a bar once, and late in the night, close to the alcohol cut off (it varied depending on the drink count, amount of slouching, slurring, and sometimes, leering), I’d sometimes have some close talker drunks or a hand on my shoulder, but never felt threatened. It almost goes with the territory of midnight music, a full bar and living in a real drinking town. Never did I feel in danger - just - well - slightly annoyed with a feeling of responsibility to make sure they all got home in one piece. Should I have felt Fear? Where did my sense of safety there come from?
Last year though, I was leaving a local music venue and walked across the street to my car. It was a Monday night, pouring rain and some of the takeout places were still open nearby - there were plenty of people around. I immediately locked the doors once I got in, as Dad taught me. I didn’t dilly dally, I started my car and as I was about to pull out, a tall man was leaning over, yanking on the passenger side door. I will remind you, it was locked. I backed out with him still trying to open the door, he slammed his hand on the roof of the car as I barreled away from him. I felt real Fear then. Was it a mistake and he thought I was his ride? Was he drunk? Needed a ride? Was he going to rob, rape or murder me? Carjack my little scratched up Subaru?
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I experienced a different kind of Fear this past month. A man had been hired to help with our college financial planning and financial aid forms. In this man’s grip for education and guidance, I came to find out about his ulterior motive for making financial recommendations and filing our forms - he was actually in money management. I spent weeks questioning his vagueness and strange and limited recommendations. I spent time trusting him and then fending off hostility and degrading behaviors when I asked questions and decided not to follow his recommendations (to invest with him). He threatened to report me to the feds, that I was doing it ALL wrong, and would be going to prison for 5 years and owe a 20k fine based on his perception of my financial situation (which is not very complicated). He even insinuated that I would lose our current year’s grants and scholarships for my daughter.
Fortunately I am not the dumb blonde that he was somehow led to believe - and in my due diligence, with the support of my repeated phone calls to the government (to double check over and over again), my daughter’s college financial aid office, two lawyers, an accountant and a financial advisor, I was able to say to him “No, you are wrong”. I had the opportunity to smartly flat out call him out on his shit - for preying on me.
During this time there were a few moments where he led me to doubt myself, my intellect, my sense of what was right. He led me to feel a false fear that I had done something wrong and he was my only way out of it. “This can be fixed” he said, while I left his office wondering what was broken. In the end, nothing needed fixing.
This man started out as a threat, when I realized, in actuality, I was the threat to him.
His anger grew and on the phone the final time we spoke, his voice grew higher, louder, frantic, as he screamed at me. Hearing a grown man spew out obscenities, sputtering threats and things that didn’t make sense was astounding - it was a bit like having an abusive 13 year old boy having a tantrum over not getting what he wanted.
For a minute there, even then, I thought “Wow, maybe I don’t know anything!” I actually still believed him a tiny bit. But in his confusion, he spat out that the reps of our government who assisted me didn’t know what they were talking about, nor did my lawyers, accountant, college financial aid office or financial advisor. It was then I knew he knew only everything about swindling and he was going crazy from losing his ego over what - little old me?
Regardless, it shook me to the core, despite my conviction that I was not wrong.
What makes someone like this? Was he under his own financial stress? He thought I was a shoe-in as a client that he was about to lose? (which he did) Was it merely his ego? Was he going to steal from me?
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The problem is, when we feel Fear, it can break us for a few minutes, hours, day, weeks, a year. Fear is paralyzing, and in that, paralysis either stops us in our tracks and dissolves into the next thing, or sometimes, it stops our worlds just for a little while until we bust out and kick some ass against it and realize “see, that wasn’t so bad…”
When there is Fear of what we are sure is coming, it is a steady climb. We are going to feel Fear our entire lives to some degree. I am afraid my daughters will break down at least once on the side of the road and have no cell service to call AAA. I am afraid I will forget to turn the stove off tomorrow night, leave the front door unlocked next week or forget my passport while traveling domestically because I forgot when the law changed. I Fear oversleeping and missing my daughter leaving for school in the morning - or, just merely forgetting half of tonight’s meal at the grocery store. I feared my mom’s sickness, I feared that I would not do the best job in caring for her. I was afraid of the call that was sure to come, how it would feel without her - I feared the heavy, heavy weight of her death long before it arrived.
In the end, I find that Fear makes us bear a heavier weight than we’re really supposed to bear - it is just work towards the truth.