Fearless Characters

Being a good, patriotic Canadian girl, I've read every L.M. Montgomery novel and story I could find. They are a light, airy confection of innocence and good intentions and love conquering all with a bit of mysticism and spiritualism thrown in for spice; all except for one or two short stories, and Rilla of Ingleside, her novel of World War I.

Now, if you haven't read it and mean to do so one day for yourself and not for your offspring, you'll want to skip the next few paragraphs. "Spoilers" does not quite do them justice.

Walter, Anne and Gilbert's sensitive poet-son, who is afraid of getting his teeth pulled (and who later remarks that it was worse in his imagination than it was in reality) and loves beauty, who spent two years avoiding military service because of his intense fears of combat and physical pain and war, goes to war and dies. A letter arrives posthumously for his sister Rilla, which reads in part:

"'Rilla, the Piper will pipe me 'west' tomorrow. I feel sure of this. And Rilla, I'm not afraid. When you hear the news, remember that. I've won my own freedom here--­freedom from all fear. I shall never be afraid of anything again­--not of death­--nor of life, if after all, I am to go on living. And life, I think, would be the harder of the two to face--­for it could never be beautiful for me again. There would always be such horrible things to remember--­things that would make life ugly and painful always for me. I could never forget them. But whether it's life or death, I'm not afraid, Rilla-my-Rilla, and I am not sorry that I came. I'm satisfied.'"

(And people say I use too many hyphens.)

Or, as Anthony Robbins more succinctly said, "Do what you fear, and the death of fear is certain."

In my experience, fear doesn't die; but it ceases to be terrible.

~~~~~

"Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake." Edgar Wallace

I spent three months in Germany on exchange at seventeen and, apparently in all defiance of normal German codes of teenaged conduct, obstinately continued my habit of skipping classes where I knew I wouldn't learn anything. One day a friend of mine visited, and I skipped a whole day and took her on a tour of Stuttgart. We shopped and reveled in gossipping in English and, while walking the pedestrian-only downtown, noticed two boys following us. They followed us down the promenade, they followed us up the promenade, they followed us to a large park, they pantomimed getting a small child to carry us a note, and then a goose. (Both sensibly refused.) They left; we went and got the note; they returned.

"I want the brunette," said my friend.

"You can have him," I said.

When the beautiful blond boy, who spoke only German (rare for Germany), later asked us to join them in a tour of the local countryside in their battered truck late into the night, what do you think we said?

We said yes. Of course. Threw seventeen years apiece of stranger-danger training overboard and had the time of our lives. And despite everything that followed after that blond boy and I fell in love--his disappearance, reappearance, and presumed death; the doubts about his identity (he might actually have been a criminal; but if so, a very kind one)--I've never regretted it.

~~~~~

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." Eleanor Roosevelt

After fourteen years of practicing a form of Wicca which advises one to do exactly what one is disposed not to do, I have a hard time thinking about fear as a meaningful input to action. In fact, I can't think of a single thing I am afraid of which makes any rational sense--I can't think of a single instance where fear discouraged me from doing something I was better off not doing. Instead, it either prevents me from doing something I need to (like proper diabetes care) or fails to discourage me from doing something I shouldn't (like hopping in an old truck with two German sweet-talkers).

I suppose, like anger, it gives one useful information--"there is something potentially dangerous nearby"--but, then, my first impulse these days is often--"...so I should kill it."

Snakes? Neato. Spiders? Love them in the garden, not in the kitchen. Ants? Fascinating. Bees? Beautiful--the bigger the better. Heights? A moment of vertigo, quickly cured by stepping closer to the edge.

In our first house, the last phone jack was unfinished when we moved in, leaving a hole in the wall approximately two inches square. This hole quickly became a four-inch circle.

"I think we have mice," said Erik.

"I think you're right," I said, as I watched one scurry across the kitchen floor. The cats, damn their lazy bones, blinked in weary surprise from their safe perches on the couch.

A trip to the local hardware store turned up only killing traps, the kind you see on old Looney Tunes episodes with the snapping bar and a place to stick a piece of cheese. We bought one and set it, and late that night, awoke to a hideous high-pitched squeaking in the kitchen. The mouse (it turned out there was only one) was caught, and had left a trail of blood twelve inches long on the counter as it tried to walk out of the trap. It was screaming. The poor thing had broken two legs, and was bleeding in astonishing quantities for a creature as large as my thumb; it had only wanted to get out of the cold, have a warm place to raise its babies, make a better life for itself. Isn't that why we build houses? But as an education in ecology will make abundantly clear, territorial impulses are nearly universal (we can't share our house with a mouse; it could spread disease and pests and eat our food) and life means death.

I hate that it was necessary, but I don't regret trapping the mouse. No. What I regret is that I carried it outside with a plastic bag wrapped around my hands, freed it from the trap, and didn't snap its neck. I let the cold and/or local predators finish my job for me, at likely considerable extra pain for the mouse, to spare myself. It was cowardly. That, I regret.

~~~~~

I am not in the least way fearless.

I am afraid of saying what I really think, here.

I am afraid of not saying anything interesting, thus driving all of you away.

I am terrified of Frances dying. Or hurting herself. Or getting seriously sick.

I am afraid of being fired.

I am afraid of working at this desk for the rest of my life.

I am afraid of never publishing anything worthwhile.

I am terrified of publishing.

I am afraid of the complications of diabetes, especially and unreasonably blindness.

I am afraid of dying in a fire.

I am afraid, after having defined myself by my brain from my earliest memories, of suffering brain damage.

I am afraid of publishing this. When I do, I will be afraid that you won't comment, afraid that you will comment, and afraid that if you do comment it will be to call me names. I'll be afraid that two years from now it will be an embarassing public record of something best forgotten. I can pack a whole lot of fear into a very small act.

I am afraid of so much that if I ever let it define my behaviour, I wouldn't leave my bed. Much of it I have no choice but to confront, sometimes regularly (diabetes). A calculation of risk is of no benefit when you have been struck by lightning multiple times; one inhabits an awareness that a small risk is no guarantee that one will not be affected. Still.

Still.

I survived nineteen years of being told that I was worthless almost every day. I have survived fourteen years of chronic illness requiring needles and bloodletting. I have survived the loss of a 21-year-old love, I have survived divorce, I have survived Frances's medical merry-go-round. I watched an aunt survive after she told her sniffly five-year-old daughter to "go to her room" after misbehaving, then found her dead on the stairs.

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave." Mark Twain

What puzzles me only now that I reflect on it is that all of these intensely painful experiences made me more resistant to fear. Not less likely to experience it, but less likely to be influenced by it. It seemed so obvious to me that, of course, if your classmates make a sport of ridiculing everything about you and your parents tell you daily that they'd get rid of you if they could and the only faithful companion you have is a dog who's a really great listener but not a fabulous conversationalist--once you got out of it, you would look back and say, "I wouldn't want to do that again, but if I had to, I could." Which is exactly what I do whenever I start talking or writing about some issue that bothers people. And it seemed obvious to me that threats of being abandoned by one's parents would make one impervious to threats or fears of being abandoned by ... anyone else. And it seemed obvious that watching a relative lose a beloved child suddenly would steel one to the necessity of letting go of one's own children when appropriate, that having one's teenaged diary published in the country's largest-circulation newspaper would be a useful barometer against which to compare the publication of anything else with the potential to be embarassing.

But maybe not. Maybe that is, in this particular emotional sphere, for me, where nature and nurture have intersected; maybe the collision of chaos and my bedrock bad-temper and stubborness are what has allowed me to survive an avalanche, stand up and say, "OK, that hurt, I'd prefer it not happen again; but if it did, I would still be here."

~~~~~

"I must not fear...."

When I was nine years old and ran away from home (again), my backpack slung over one shoulder, my father stopped me at the door. "Don't you know what's going to happen to you?" he said. "You'll end up a prostitute. Don't you know what that means?"

I shook my head.

"If you walk out that door, you're not coming back in again."

"Good."

"If you walk out that door, you're not a member of this family any longer. And only members of this family get to have a housekey. Are you going to give me your housekey?"

I slipped the cord from around my neck, pressed it into his hand, opened the door, and left.

"...Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration...."

When I was seventeen, and back in Canada with Mono, and M~ was calling every week from Germany and the english in his letters was steadily improving, and then they stopped--he went to Switzerland and that was it--and all I could hear were his last words to me on the phone, "We see us again someday"--and I wrote letter after increasingly frantic letter, and I could not get his father on the phone, and I rarely left my bedroom except to check the mail several times a day (as if something would appear several hours after the drop-off) and to my volunteer post at the church for Vacation Bible School, and I could think of nothing else, the grief and panic were I believe what led to that August's diagnosis with type 1 diabetes.

"...I will face my fear...."

When I was seventeen, and in the hospital learning how to manage diabetes, a nurse showed me how to pull the plunger on the syringe back, inject air into the insulin vial, then pull the insulin into the syringe and get rid of all the little tiny bubbles.

"Then I inject it?" I asked.

"Yes. Here's an orange...."

"Into my stomach? Like this?"

"Well, you should pinch up some fat to put it in. That's right. You don't want to practice with the orange?"

"No." I put it in, depressed the plunger, waited and withdrew it. Not as bad as I had thought it would be.

"...I will permit it to pass over me and through me...."

When I was still living with my parents, for three years I kept my head down and out of their way, so I wouldn't end up homeless; they had threatened to turf me out on my sixteenth birthday which was, as they frequently reminded me, the termination of their legal responsibility as parents. I didn't know how I would take care of myself if they did; I didn't know where I would live, or how I would get myself to university, get my education so I could support myself and never ever have to depend on anyone else for the necessities of life ever again. But, oh, what did it get me? They'd never saved a dime for my education. They had no money for me--money for new furniture and toys for my brother and new wardrobes for my Mom, sure. But, as I found out while applying for university in my last year of highschool, they expected me to save for my education. In the end, they paid for my first year's tuition; they made too much money for me to qualify for student loans, so I found a cheap place to live and didn't get phone service and saved 99% of that summer's earnings so I could afford to go, and I signed up for the co-op program so I could pay for it myself from then onward.

I gave in to my fears for three years for what, in the end, turned out to be one year's worth of tuition. Was it worth it?

My preparations for the Motherlode conference did not, ah, make me a very popular person in some parts of the blogosphere, which is ironic considering I was supposed to have been motivated by a desire for greater popularity. The whole thing was terrifying and deeply painful. But the rewards for compliance are never as high as advertised, and speaking up is rarely as expensive as one fears. So I was flamed. So what? No, it wasn't fun; it hurt a lot, in fact; but look: Here I am. Right where I left me.

"...And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing...."

I started submitting pieces for publication last year in part because the prospect of rejection scared the pants off me. When one of those thin envelopes comes back in the mail, I shake, I open it, I file the form letter away, I think it over for a few days if it wasn't a form letter and had potentially useful commentary. For a few moments, there is fear; once I open the envelope, it's gone.

Fear isn't fatal. It only feels that way. One common piece of advice for sufferers of panic attacks is to remember that it only feels like you're having a heart attack and about to die. Then it goes away.

When I've walked down dark city streets or paths at midnight alone and heard the crunch of an approaching stranger's shoes, my sole concession to anxiety was to hold my keys in my fist. I don't see pain as something in all instances to be avoided, so to be afraid of pain alone and to allow that fear to control my reactions would not be, in my view, positive. Furthermore it seems so often that fear is a societally conditioned response instead of a useful guide to behaviour, that our adrenaline is so malleable to a good advertising campaign or a few episodes of Oprah. Is that why I see fear as an enemy? Something to be subjugated. Something to be conquered.

The geeks among you will already recognize the quote fragments I've been using in this section; from Frank Herbert's Dune, a series of novels good only for this one concept, in my opinion, as the rest of it is so blatantly a misogynistic terror of female power that I have never been able to finish it. Not that these quoted sentiments are unique, but I find this expression of them, in their self-directedness, uniquely useful:

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

When the torrent comes down and it feels like I'm drowning, I've learned to tell myself to grab whatever I can and keep my head above water, keep breathing. "All you have to do is live," I tell myself. And once seen in such basic terms, there have not been many fears I've been unable to face and conquer.

When the torrent rushes past, as it always does, I will still be here.

Posted by Andrea at February 13, 2007 6:51 AM under Me

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