happy friday friends—let’s talk about fear.
when my son, Z, learned how to ride a bike at 3 (and a half) i texted every single person i know. because i was amazed and thrilled and couldn’t help but let that excitement bubble up and out into the world. one of those exchanges went like this:
friend: WOW!! was he afraid?
me: no, not at all
me: he was aggressively not afraid, actually
friend: Aggressively Not Afraid: A Memoir, By Z
that phrase “Aggressively Not Afraid” stayed in my head ever since, because it is just too true to how Z moves in the world. he is so unafraid in fact that i often feel proud and relieved when he does seem hesitant about his capabilities—when he pauses before dunking his head under the water or hurling himself from a ledge.
but mostly he leaps. and mostly he lands. and mostly he is okay.
being Z’s B (my parent name) has taught me countless lessons. but one of the biggest and most important ones has been how to be a little bit less afraid. the verb of Z’s existence reminds me to swallow my own words and fears to let him walk and jump and dance in the world the way he needs to to be whole. to be himself.
it is something i aspire to in my own life—to walk and jump and dance in the world the way i need to to be whole. to be aggressively not afraid.
i had a revelation about fear the first time i did a 4th step. one of the columns on the print out worksheet was labeled “fear.” for weeks i carried that worksheet around in my backpack and left the column empty.
i don’t really think i have that much fear i even told my sponsor at the time.
then sitting around a scratched up wooden table with lukewarm coffee in a styrofoam cup on a random Wednesday afternoon it hit me—what i had learned to call “anxiety” was just fear by another name.
i first recognized the feeling of anxiety in my body when i was in 8th grade (although i am sure i felt it before that, i just didn’t have the words to describe it yet). but in 8th grade i sat with my mom in the car one morning outside our school and said: it is just like i can’t breathe. like my lungs won’t balloon all the way up—like there is always a sip of breath i can’t quite catch.
this was the same year i had a recurring nightmare that i was trapped my school elevator as it plummeted to the ground. i always woke up just before we hit—perpetually suspended right before the crash.
there were of course many tangled reasons (as there always are) why my body was holding so much fear and worry that year. why it was having such a hard time filling my lungs. many of those reasons kept on being true for years—some of them are still true in some way to this day—what has shifted is my relationship to fear, and to breathing.
in my early twenties when i first moved to China and was living thousands of miles away from everyone i loved and everyone i had ever been i started proclaiming loudly and repeatedly that i didn’t have anxiety. gaslighting yourself, practicing CBT, whatever you want to call it, i simply started telling myself a different story.
i’m not anxious, i would say. it medium worked, and medium didn’t. i was desperately lonely for most of my time abroad—and i wasn’t devoid of fear—but telling myself a new story helped me keep moving. i navigated international airports and cities and cross country moves all in my second language and without any support system to fall back on.
i kept telling myself the story that i wasn’t anxious for a number of years after that, and it kept on kind of working and it wasn’t until i was staring at the 4th step worksheet that all the ways it wasn’t working came into focus.
by insisting that i simply was not a thing that i kind of still was, i wasn’t giving my fear any room to move up and out.
so i tried something new. i sat very still and felt the air move in and out of my lungs. i observed my racing thoughts with as little judgement as possible. i started talking to the bubble in my chest, greeting it first hiii friend, where did you travel from today? have you eaten? and then seeing if i could help it soften around the edges.
sometimes we don’t realize how much fear is ruling over us until it is too late. this past year my future was the most palpably uncertain it has ever been—while i waited to hear if Z would be moved out of state or would end up staying in my life forever my fear became so all encompassing it started to eat up everything else. and the only thing i could do was pull further and further into myself. make myself as small as possible to try and get some space away from the fear where i could still wash the dishes or write an email in relative peace.
the pulling away and getting small was necessary, but not without consequence. one of the main consequences being that even when i regained some certainty, the muscle memory of letting fear take up so much space inside my body didn’t go away.
i couldn’t find my way back into myself or my heart until something (shoutout to getting heartbroken) cracked it all open again. and then i felt—i felt every feeling i’d been cowering away from out of fear that they would swallow me whole.
i cried every day (or multiple times a day) for five weeks. the feelings came up and up and up and out and out and out and when they were done i stopped crying. and i was left with some of the most immense and expansive gratitude i’ve felt in years. it came easily. it made me smile. it made my chest fill with light.
because once again, i’d learned one of the best lessons we ever get to learn: we have to love. we have to let ourselves get devastated by love and by life. and then we have to love again. and get devastated again. there is simply no other way.
i know the muscle memory of fear will come back—i will fall out of gratitude and get knocked down and pull away and have to begin again. but for now, i am wildly grateful to have remembered how to be a little less afraid and a little more in love—with myself and this life and everything i hold dear. because truly, what the fuck else is the point of any of this?
a prayer to walk and jump and dance in the world the way i need to to be whole. to be aggressively not afraid in my own life. to move with more love.
give me strength to keep my heart open, even when the salt water rises above my chest, give me courage to turn toward kindness, even when my feet falter beneath me. let me trust always that when i breathe, it is right. when i breathe, i begin again.
Oh, Billie- right on time for me. This is gorgeous. Oy, heartbreak- but if the writing is never wasted then the living isn’t either. I think living our rough drafts may be what we’re actually doing here, which makes me wonder who is reading our polished work? Maybe those who love us and see us as polished anyway? So glad we don’t have to do it alone- my heart aches for you for the loneliness that brought you to this fire. But look- Fire!
Thanks for reminding me to trust we can begin again, and for Z’s “Aggressively Not Afraid.”
That fear likes to fill up the space I’d rather hold open for the softness of possibility. At my weakest I find I get anxious when I don’t feel anxious because that weight of anxiety is oddly comfortable, like a weighted blanket—that fear that says it is protecting you like a friend when it is really the one holding you back.
Grateful for you, your bravery and vulnerability in sharing here, your words, your stories with Z and yourself. And happy to read you in stereo today at WITD, too!
Billie, So potent to talk about fear. When it is gone, I forget about it completely, then...the wolf is at the door. It is such a human experience. Is there a single human being who has not felt fear? So many kinds of it - the kind that threatens our physical existance or the physical existance of someone we love deeply - like when my 29 year old daughter was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia while traveling in Denmark. I couldn't breathe for months. Then, there is the fear that lives in the psyche - no one can see it. But it is so alive and foreign and menacing, and I lived with that for a couple years and it also stole my breath, a snake that wrapped itself around my solar plexus, crushing my will. Thank you for making this real again. For me, I am grateful to have spent many years meeting it in the dark and getting to know it and inviting it to tell me what it needs to say. For me, it was the only way, to make it a friend. And still, some fear is very useful and also a friend. May you find peace.