On fear : some thoughts

I have been gaining deeper insights lately into how my own fear rules my life and how it can masquerade under other emotions.. I cannot always be aware it is fear that is motivating me, I sometimes put it down to having nearly died twice, to the point after the second head injury I went into a kind of major dissociative paralysis or freezing.. I just did not feel safe to sleep or wake and then I would lash out or I know my behavior was a problem for others which I must own.

Lately I can still feel shame but that (I have learned) is very much a fundamental part of having had traumatic experiences in our lives that we had no control over, then subsequently due to enormity of it all the risk of coming alive may seem far too huge to take.

I am reading a very moving book, On living at the moment by a lady called Kerry Eganwho served as a hospice chaplin to the dying in America for some years.. It’s funny how you come across books, this one came up on my local library site when I was searching for another book. Reading the first few chapters today it has made confronting reading.. She talks about her own resistance to those she must visit in a great deal of pain that she is tempted to (and initially does run from) before she develops the spiritual muscle to be there and be fully present to them in all kinds of emotional states of being and mind associated with facing the prospect of their limits and finite mortality. And when she is there people on the edge of death open up to her with amazing stories of their lives, things they have never told another human being, stories about babies born to unwed mothers given up and then sought back, about a man who lives under the illusion he may be the recipient of a lung transplant that may avert death (not humanly possible for him to undergo the surgery but he continues to live in hope),…about a woman who slowly and painfully turns around the deep hatred of her body she has absorbed as a woman growing up in our self rejecting and body shaming culture.

Lately I am also realizing that fear for me often makes me blame others for things not their fault, like my parents. I cried a lot in therapy on Thursday listening to The Carpenter’s song I shared in a post this week I Won’t Last A Day Without You, so many deep realizations dawning around my Dad and the longing I felt to be close to him that never came to fruition, memories of those poignant final 6 years of his life when he had to witness two daughters nearly die within less than 5 months of each other, only then to become fatally ill with terminal cancer.

I was researching the English actor Ben Chaplin yesterday as I am also currently watching the UK drama series about the news media Press in which he plays a ruthless and cut throat editor and I learned that he lost his own sister when young and had this to say about the experience.

An earlier bereavement hit Chaplin especially hard. “My eldest sister. She was tough, opinionated, brilliant. She died when I’d started doing quite well. I’d just done The Remains of the Day and she never saw it. I remember thinking she’d have been proud of me for that.” He says her death altered him profoundly. “To appreciate the impermanence of life at that young age is a gift. It made me kinder, more tolerant, a better actor. But sadder. I have a darkness I didn’t have before. It’s definitely been a less gleeful life since.”

Which made me realise if I tend to come down hard on myself for being very low and sad and dark at times, it really is no wonder having had to face death and multiple traumas at such a young age myself.

And yet, I also long to be more fearless. I long to judge less and love more. To seek forgiveness and recognize with tenderness instead of bitter resentment the frailty and limits of those in my family and life that may have hurt me in the past.

In her book Egan remarks that towards the final stages of dying what people most want to talk about is not some lofty theories of meaning and the search for relevance but about their families, about the love longed for and never given or received or the love that finally opened their hearts.

And I guess the take home from all of this for me is surely about impermanence.. We may unconsciously fear being obliterated at any time and sudden deaths surround us every day. As I opened my computer to write this post after dinner the story came up on my MSN feed about the death of Foo Fighters drummer, Taylor Hawkins at the age of 50. We really just never do know when in my father’s words “our number will be up.”

Fear may block us for reaching out for so much, it may keep us locked up in defenses we may never find the courage to face or ability to articulate. And is this not just because in the end when all is said and done being fearful and the ways we navigate that problematic emotion are so fundamental to our finite human experience on this amazing planet? And yet the soul lives on, at least that is what I believe.. So why fear in the end? What helpful purpose does it serve? Well sometimes it does keep us safe.. What a dilemma!