On fear

I suspect the Millennial affiliation for quotations and affirmations isn’t unique to our generation. In fact, I know it’s not. But there’s something about the advent of AIM away messages and the old favorite quote sections on Facebook and MySpace that may have turned the affiliation into an affliction.

Rare behaved women rarely make history! (Marilyn Monroe)

Not all those who wander are lost!  (J.R.R. Tolkien)

But this one has been worming its way into my every thought spiral lately:

Courage is not the absence it fear but the triumph over it. (FDR)

That quote makes me feel like a coward and a fraud. Not because I don’t think I have been brave, but because I don’t think I have a normal relationship with fear.

I have jumped out of airplanes and gotten into a river full of 1,000 lb brown bears. (The first with a guide, the second without.) I tend to say yes first and think through the logistics later. 

Everything usually works out. At lease, that’s my default setting.

Here’s where the glitch comes in—and this time the problem is, I think, truly unique to Millennials.

We are the first generation where our parents said, “you can do anything you want to; be anyone you want to be.”

That’s a sentiment that is empowering on the surface but damning in practice.

What if all you want is to be loved? What if what you want to do… is make people like you? Those are not actually things you can control;  it’s not in your power to achieve them. But when you’ve been raised to believe you can accomplish anything… you don’t accept that defeat. If you can’t achieve these goals—if people don’t like you, if a lover rejects you… it stops feeling like a natural part of human life and starts to feel like failure.

We can do anything, after all. Right????

This is the world in which I learned fear. Bears and airplanes were no threat to me. But being unpopular? Being rejected by the tribe? Those were very real threats.

And so my body is wired for a world that goes against nature and is permanently in flux. I live in a body that gets hit by a quick wave of butterflies when I’m standing at the end of a cliff but has a full blown panic attack when my boyfriend starts acting weird for no reason.

I have become someone who doesn’t panic when her mom is diagnosed with cancer or when her boyfriend is lost at sea… those are things we can measure and plan for. Where you can apply order and spreadsheets to the chaos.

Need me to plan a funeral? On it.

But, need me to feel the actual pain of the loss? To sit in the knowledge that no matter how hard I work, how fast I run, how skinny I get, how much money I make, how pretty I am… I will never hear my favorite person say “I love you” again? Just writing that takes the breath out of my lungs as sharply as it did 14 years ago.

Read that again. My mom died more than a decade ago and her death still terrifies me. Because she told me I could do anything—but I couldn’t save her.

When I was little, she used to tell me that someday a man would get lost in my eyes. And so, at 40, every failed relationship feels like I failed her. I don’t just feel sad at the loss of the relationship, I worry that with every misstep I am accidentally turning my mother into a liar.

I suspect that I am not alone in this. And perhaps my affinity for FDRs words about fear are a hurdle to overcome in therapy—words intended for a different generation, one that actively stared down bombs and starvation without the ever-present early warning system of cell phones and social media.

Or perhaps I am focused on the wrong portion of his speech. Perhaps the more accurate quotation to home in on is the more popular, “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Maybe in this new world, nearly a century later, risking love and cancelation and rejection really does carry the same risk that once came from staring down a wolf or enlisting in the military.

I don’t have an answer to this question, despite becoming a mini scholar in fear, binging horror movies, reading books, going to therapy. I’ve watched friends become immobile at the idea of flying (something I do regularly and with ease). And I’ve watched myself… a successful professional my nearly every metric… absolutely freeze in panic the moment I detect the sound of alcohol in my dad’s voice. I’ve gone to some of the darkest places to avoid the pain of gaslighting and rejection.

So how to tie this up? What have I learned about fear, in the end?

Perhaps I’d say this: You can’t control what scares you. The best you can do is to learn your enemy—because battle is inevitable and defeat is not an option.

Courage is a battle plan.