How I Learned About Fear

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Somewhere buried deep in the miasma that was childhood, there is a memory that lingers sweetly, classified as a mother’s comfort. Ultimately it is a first, and most vivid, the memory of fear. The age is fuzzy. Maybe 4? Footed pajamas protested the chill of the house, the windows open to the weather outside. I recall the rumbling noise of a storm.

The feeling before a storm is electric, after enough fear in your life, that electric feeling can be cathartic, warm, even enticing. At some point, you grow accustomed to that reminder of your mortality, that little sense that something might still be alive inside you. When you’re a toddler, though, that feeling is altogether strange. The acoustics seem ominous, larger than your small body, overwhelming. The night sky an inky morphing cloud cover suffocating the moonlight.

Clutching the sides of my head, my little nails digging into the tougher part of the back of my ears, I ran until I found my mom. She picked me up as I rushed her knees in absolute protest of what I know now to the inevitable groan of the skies. When fear grips your physical body it leaves a scar, a sort of blueprint for other fearful things to follow and graze your full anatomy like little pinpricks that bleed the resolve from the bone, the muscle, the heart of you.

My heart clamored to scream against my ribcage, hurried and crawling to my throat to suffocate the little whimpers that came with tears in those days. Dear heart when you braved new, scary things with the hope of overcoming them. When time was a reassurance that I might survive an event. I remember feeling hot in my pajamas, my collar felt as if it would choke me as I tried to survive this crescendo of sound that shook my core. My mother took me to the window to show me not to be afraid which ultimately created a sort of cat-like clinging and reaching into the ether of a dark bedroom for a savior. I suppose sometimes I still reach into the ether…a kind of strangled screaming in my dreams.

The storm came, lightning crashed, and destroyed the normally quiet sanctity of night that was, itself, a lullaby to me at the time. 30 years later and I can’t sleep without persistent noise, another weird neurosis I’m sure we’ll discuss someday. The howling of the wind, like some wild creature I had convinced myself existed whipped at the screens in the windows and ruined my belief that I lived in an impervious structure. This was the safe space. Or, so you might think before life teaches you harsher lessons over time.

We Build Comfort Systems

And we form them early. Perhaps, over time, mine was interrupted. I recall the softness of being held, but looking over my mother’s shoulder out of that very same window that taught me shelter is not always safety. A rocking motion would soon lull me. Distant booming and the wind became a sort of whisper over time.

As I aged the rocking became a sort of motion that delineated a moment, helped define the less casual times as times that required comfort. We seem to develop, at least early, our view of danger measured by someone else’s standard of fear. Those who raise us teach us what we need to know about our environment. Is this scary? Is this dangerous? But the fear was innate. Right? Does fear feed off its environment? Is fear hungry for others’ feelings? Do we use that consumed fear to fuel our own like emotional osmosis?

Maybe it is the whisper of a soft voice, the feeling of someone speaking against your chest. Perhaps it’s a food, warm milk…honey, junk food. Perhaps we find comfort in nature. Each person is, in a way, a culmination of what happened to them and how they were able to interpret those events. For me, it was a childhood long need for stuffy toys. I would eventually line them up in a row, cover my head in a blankey fort and ride the storm out with my plush friends. What was I hiding from? When did I stop hiding? I suppose it was when I discovered there were worse things than the weather.

Comfort is born in, in part, by trauma. Realistically, without fear, we wouldn’t need comfort. Without the threat of pain, without suffering, without enduring, comfort would be obsolete. What are your comfort objects? What do you cling to when the fear creeps in?

This post was previously published on Hello, Love.

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