There’s this exercise, a rather well known one, where the participants are asked to take out a sheet of paper, or open a new text document, and just start writing. No agendas, no particular aim other than to start writing without stopping. Ideally, even spelling and grammatical errors aren’t an issue the writer should concern herself with. It’s been a long time since I’ve attempted the exercise myself and I find it difficult to remain pure regarding spelling and grammar.
You see, I don’t write except on a keyboard anymore. My handwriting has gotten so bad, and it was always atrocious, especially my cursive, that even I can’t stand to look at it, much less read anything of length. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I can print rather quickly which is fine for things like grocery lists, short messages on post it notes, and writing down appointment reminders while I’m on the phone.
But something like this? Where you have to follow along for longer than a few sentences? Ha! My handwriting is like a mixture of cuneiform, heiroglyphs, and old norse. It was so bad in school, before the age of personal computers (although we did have electric typewriters, I’m not that old.), that my teachers encouraged me to learn how to type, which I did, in middle school. As fast as I can type, and I like to think I’m pretty good, I’ve got nothing on my mother. She was a medical transcriptionist, among other things, and I believe at her fastest she clocked in around 150 words a minute, which is smoking fast. She didn’t make many mistakes either, so they liked her at the office.
I’ll end the exercise here.
I didn’t bother to check my start and end time, but it didn’t feel like more than a minute or two. When I go back and read it, it occurs to me that I immediately assume an audience other than myself, so the whole thing comes across like something you might hear during a speed dating event. The sad thing is, if I were the unenviable woman sitting across from me, I’d be yearning for the buzzer. Isn’t it an unforgivable sin to mention your mother during a date? Especially the first one. As small talk goes, I suppose it isn’t bad. I mean, at least I didn’t go immediately to the weather. Or to talking about my dog.
I also didn’t reach for something heavy, or something outside myself, which tells me it’s time to try and break this rut, especially when it comes to the sort of things I’ve been posting here lately.
The times we find ourselves in, the times I find myself in, after half a hundred times around the sun, lend themselves to concern, if not downright panic. That is a hard thing for me to wrestle with. Fear is something I lived with almost constantly during the first half of my life. I patted myself on the back when I finally managed to get beyond a persistent sense of low level fear.
But it isn’t something one banishes completely.
I’m reminded of the proverb, “It is torment to fear what cannot be overcome.” This truism is something both terrorists and torture advocates rely upon. A steady supply of fear can be an effective tool in manipulating not only individuals but entire populations. Keep people afraid long enough and you’ll get them to agree to just about anything that promises an end to the torment. Fear as a tactic is a hard animal to tame though; the terrorist ultimately forges resolve rather than submission and the torturer hears what he wishes rather than the truth.
That’s one way to avoid torment. Go along, despite innocence sign the confession, throw your dearest under the onrushing train. I state this without contempt. Depending on the circumstances, human beings will do all of these and worse in order to avoid something they fear. Blind terror is a stampede that swarms and engulfs any unlucky enough in its path. Until any of us are unfortunate enough to be placed in that situation, we’d do well to extend sympathy before condemnation. Few of us have the steel to bite our own tongue off and spit the remains into the face of our tormentor.
That’s another way to avoid fear. Instead of capitulation there is self immolation as a last act of defiance. Hollywood likes to romanticize this particular method. I think it important to note this is also the dark path of many mass shooters where he either dies at his own hand (it’s no mistake I use that particular gender pronoun) or forces authorities to kill him, the so called “death by cop” scenario. In these cases, fear has metastasized into rage and despair. The dead fear nothing. While this may be just what you need when charging a machine gun nest, the almost assured outcome leaves little room for learning. Worst of all, it probably won’t eliminate the source of fear, making your death, if not pointless and stupid, at least wasteful and tragic. In the case of the suicidal mass shooter, also vile.
Yet another way to avoid fear is simply not to acknowledge it. You just hold your nose and jump right down the rabbit hole. It seems to me this is the default response for humanity. There is a certain threshold of threat big enough, but perhaps far enough away in geography or time, that we can just shelve it. This is true from asteroid strikes to super volcanoes all the way down to the plebeian reality that most of us are just one fateful car trip away from oblivion. Unfortunately, this too doesn’t address the source of the threat. Fine for you perhaps, but not very useful for everyone else.
What all of these approaches share is one thing: avoidance. This suggests the opposite as a means of respite. So easy to say, so difficult to employ. Practice is key. Facing fear gets easier the more you do it but that isn’t to say it’s ever easy. And the bigger the fear, the harder the struggle. Since youth I’ve known that I was a “dive right into the deep end” more than a “toes first, inch by inch” person. This explains why I’ve been married three times. Regardless, both ways force you to get wet.
The only way to get through fear is to engage it. It helps to remember that much of what we fear doesn’t come to pass. And even if it does, it often doesn’t come to pass in the way we envisioned. There’s also a great amount of comfort to be had in the knowledge that of all the things one can be afraid of, the preponderance of it is beyond our direct control. Our only control lies in our choice of reaction.
In practice, this shares much in common with a certain writing exercise. When faced with fear, whether of the immediate and pressing kind, or that which is completely out of your control, the important thing to remember is to recognize and then engage it – on whatever scale you can manage.
And then keep going.
Don’t stop.
