Feeling the Fear (and living anyway)

I heard Stephen Fry being interviewed on Ryan Tubridy’s radio show yesterday morning and he said something brilliant. The actor, comedian and writer often says brilliant things, and today it was, “Mood is like the weather. It’s real, and you can’t change it by wishing it away.” As a sufferer of bipolar disease, Fry has had more than his fair share of stormy days, so when he explains that, “It isn’t under one’s control as to when the sun comes out, but come out it will. One day”, I believe him. But waiting for that blue sky to show itself can be agonising. We’ve been holding out for it for almost all of 2020, sitting uncomfortably with our anxieties and fears, waking up to them each morning as if to unwelcome house guests. Is there a way to rid ourselves of them irrespective of what happens in the outside world? Or is it simply about trying to better understand those unwelcome guests so that they don’t seem so troublesome anymore? One thing is for sure, unlike when we were kids, leaving the light on at night or yelling out for mum is no longer going to get the job done, unfortunately. Nor can we douse our anxieties with water and watch them melt away as we did the Wicked Witch of the West in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Wizard Of Oz.

As children, our fears were almost always of tangible things – a scary witch in a movie, a spider sprinting across the room, a clap of thunder – whereas, in adulthood, midlife especially, our fears are existential; in a pandemic even more so.

Death, illness, stalled careers and financial insecurity are our bedfellows. I have always been an anxious and fearful individual. I suspect there’s an element of this that’s genetic, because my mother has always been a dreadful worrier and so was her father. I lucked out on the emotional gene pool it would seem. I read an article in The New York Times recently about how to outsmart our primitive response to fear and the piece of advice that impacted me most was this: “If you can sense and appreciate your fear...as merely your amygdala’s request for more information [that’s the seat of fear within the brain] rather than as a signal of impending doom, then you are on your way to calming down and engaging more conscious, logic-dominated parts of your brain.”

Fear as a request for more information? That fascinates me. My reaction to fear has always been so instinctively physical, so guttural – scorched cheeks, sick stomach, sweats, paralysis – that I’ve never really fully processed why it is that I’m afraid of something. It’s almost impossible to do so when the physical symptoms are so immediate and overwhelming. They disorient me completely and my brain switches immediately to self-preservation mode, which has always been to avoid whatever it is I’m afraid of – simply flee it, don’t face it, run away from it. Since I was a teenager, I’ve always experienced this kind of runaway fear, and my response has been, fittingly enough, to run away. The difficulty with our fears, however, is that if they go unchecked, they become our truth. American journalist and author Hunter S Thompson once said, “Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you like a thing that might have to be killed.” In other words, face your fear and do it anyway.

I’ve always found that last phrase to be trite. In my mind, there is absolutely nothing so much easier said than done. Instead of citing platitudes to those of us who suffer from an anxious and fear-filled nature, I prefer author Elizabeth Gilbert’s approach. She suggests instead that we meet our fears with compassion. It’s so easy to use our anxieties as another rod with which to beat our own backs. They reinforce our niggling belief that we’re not good enough, that we’re in some way less than our peers. We conceal our fears out of shame and embarrassment and so they can do as much psychological damage as acne does to a teenager, pushing us to withdraw from life rather than fully take part. I mentioned in a previous article for Heyday that I’m incredibly fearful of driving anywhere alone that I haven’t been before. After I wrote this, a colleague messaged me and told me that she’s always been terrified of driving on the M50 and simply doesn’t do it. This was the most validating response I could have had because she’s a “proper” grown-up in my mind, yet her fears are just like mine – irrational, yes, but legitimate nonetheless.

Life coach Nikki Armytage told The Guardian, “Fear shows up when we are tired and worn down.” Which one of us isn’t tired and worn down right now? Of course, we’re afraid, and that doesn’t mark us out as weak, just normal. This is a year when a lot of us will identify with Rachel’s description of how she felt when Ross hooked up with Julie in Friends: “There’s rock bottom, fifty feet of crap, then me.” Elizabeth Gilbert’s solution is to ask, “If the most loving and supportive and strong person in the world was here to take care of me, what would I want to hear that person say?” Then she begins writing down those words to herself. She describes this as, “[The] voice of compassion and love and patience that I show to myself now, whenever I’m afraid.” I’ve never heard of fear being handled so gently. It’s always heralded as something we have to face down, confront and meet head-on; for me, this conjures aggressive images of armoured suits and medieval jousts.

Gilbert’s approach also sits with scientific research referenced in the New York Times article already mentioned, which suggests that the brain’s fear sensor is less likely to react if we are reminded that we are loved. But while Gilbert says writing what is essentially a type of love letter to yourself is really very easy, I’m not sure I agree. It sounds awkward and uncomfortable to me, but then I’ve never enjoyed journaling nor have I ever kept a diary. I do believe, though, that normalising our fear responses and compassionately accepting our emotional habits is the only way forward and through this. I read an article on Insight Timer, an online community for meditation, which suggested we ask ourselves three questions: how would we treat an anxious child that needed comforting during a traumatic time; what would we say to a nervous child who needed support; and how would we protect a scared and sad child. The key then is to internalise these comforting responses. Maybe this is what scared parents do all the time?

Elizabeth Gilbert also said that the opposite of fear is not courage but compassion. This is my fundamental take-away from everything I’ve read: compassion, for ourselves as much as for each other. Our fears are not ridiculous, but nor are they our truth. So let’s sit tight, be kind and keep our fingers crossed for a change in the weather, as Fry would say.