Fear is a place I’ll never go again
Before Steve and I married, there were moments that have now become seared in my memory where he said something, I felt something, and yet we went on as if nothing had happened. One of these moments happened right after we had had sex in his bed on the floor, on Mason Street, with the foggy light of the San Francisco summer, and the noise of the trolley clanging its way up the hill.
“I love you,” he said.
“Will you love me forever,” I said.
“I can’t really say forever. No one knows forever,” he said.
If I close my eyes and try to imagine Rachel, 30 years old, having just left her second husband, living in a place unknown and unfamiliar, lying in bed with a 26 year old who wore 501 jeans and wrinkled shirts, after she had done something familiar – leave one man for another – fall into a relationship whole hog – what was she feeling when he popped the amorous bubble she was floating inside?
She felt fear. She felt that she was not enough. His inability to look romantically into a future together that would never end made her believe he saw her shortcomings too.
Fear is a place I will never go again.
What has changed in my relationship with fear is it does not cripple this Rachel, or make her believe she is not good enough, or powerless, or weak, or stupid. Albeit it had done this many times in the past.
I am grateful to Adam for my therapy. He has helped me look at Rachels from my past who were terrified and paralyzed by fear. Not feeling good enough was the underpinning of most of my fear.
And I remember facing fear for the first time without balking. I was standing in the kitchen of the Hall, on the phone with my attorney. She was telling me something I couldn’t do that I had already done and as she spoke her fear became transparent.
She argued why I should be scared, when she was the one who sounded scared, and I tried to respond but she cut me off, so I tuned out her words and zeroed in on her fear. If this happens, then this will happen, and it could make this happen. Outside the tall windows, kudzo vines were trailing upward and criss crossing the window panes creating a natural shield against the Mississippi sun and heat. We are going to have to make this happen because if not this could happen. I closed my eyes and breathed in slowly, thinking she is so scared about what might happen and I am here, breathing, and I calmly welcomed her fear. So what? I said.
This was a turning point for me. I had made a mistake in one of my Rachel versions where I signed an agreement that I shouldn’t have and for over a decade it cost me sleepless nights, and endless worry, and oh, oh, oh, so much fear. People had warned me to be scared, even my son’s therapist had predicted, “As long as there is breath, you will be in battle,” and I was scared about it all.
Then one day, I just didn’t think that fear was bigger than me anymore, and I met it head on. And that is when I truly became clairvoyant about fear, mine and other people’s, and I knew how to respond.
Is this the part where I let go? I ask now when fear comes calling. This version of Rachel feels damn good enough and often times better than good enough.
During the time of Covid, Susie and Ceil and I started a book club – we read Intuitive Eating, and the best thing we read were The Paramis. Susie had made copies for both Ceil and me (perhaps at her funny Jewish friend’s copy shop in Boston). I sat at my kitchen table, by one of the tall windows where kudzu, having died back in the winter, was now sending young bright green shoots wending upward. Spring had sprung and with it, a worldwide pandemic. Fear inducing, and yet so out of context, it was interesting times.
The Paramis are the ten qualities of character that can be developed to support the path of awakening. What I took away from my reading was this: when the tidal wave is bearing down on you, stand there open arms, in your truth, face it, eyes open, let it wash over you, under you, through you — the wave will pass, and you and your truth will still be standing.
This is how I approach the place called fear. Recognize it, empathize with it, and let it go.
The other fear I’ve known is a place I’ll never go again.
