Fear: an essay from the archive in 2020

In four months I’ll be forty years of age. Four months. Four decades. Four letters in my name and in the word that won’t leave my head. I am afraid, have been afraid, continue to be afraid and may always feel fear. In the life I lead it is not always the heart pumping as it leaves your chest for your throat type. It is the hiding behind obtuse motivation kind. It is the silent partner in decision making kind. It is the everyone else is naked in the spa and I can no longer believe my body should openly exist kind. There should be a switch for this. I know the fear is there but I often identify it too late. I know it is there but I’ve gotten so good at facing into it that it hides and burrows until I figure it out later. I’m not angry, I’m afraid. I’m not hurt, I’m afraid. I’m not a person, I’m afraid. Fear as the silent partner in decision making follows me around. It’s like: don’t say that. Don’t ask for that. Don’t look at that. Don’t think that. In therapy one of the first skills I learned was to correct the negative self-talk voice. But fear is so much quieter and cleverer than that bully. It makes things seem sensible. It’s like: I’m just here to protect you! And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But the line between safety and over-protectiveness is wafer thin. Boundaries can’t always be fixed. They need to bleed into each other. Maybe that murky edge there where the ink is running into water is actually where something will be wonderful until it becomes awful or it will be AWFUL immediately. You don’t know until you know unless you never even try. Fear says do not under any circumstances let yourself believe that you would try anything, ever. Just don’t. 

I moved to Japan as a twenty-two year old because I was afraid I would continue on in a life I wasn’t living for myself. I had known I was queer since I was eighteen but I barely acknowledged it to most people in my life. I had relationships in secret. I furiously hid any and all detail from my family. I moved to Japan because the access was easy and incremental: one small step after another small step. Fill out an application. Turn up to an interview. Get on a plane. My fear compelled me into the face of myself and into hiding. The only white person in a rural northern Hokkaidō town. For some reason I decided to trick myself into heterosexuality but to my complete surprise ended making a group of queer friends. I lived a small and quiet life where I could hear myself in my own head. I spent a year mostly alone, mostly writing. Eventually, I thought myself into a proper existence. In 2020 the self I grew in 2002 is old enough to drink. Eighteen years under my own steam. I have tried to explain the feeling of being seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty and twenty-one out loud multiple times. By those ages many people are alive and well as themselves. I was in a cloud, a fog, a muddy river trying to swim to an edge to get perspective only to find it was a lake. I was leashed like a dog as a child. I understood the basic commands that kept me silent that kept me obedient. My food was restricted, my body was a disappointment and I had to return to the house at 11pm every night. In some of those places there was safety. I was ill-equipped to deal with difficult situations involving alcohol or sex and the curfew was an easy escape. I could rely on my father’s rules to keep me “safe”. But now from this distance I feel it for what it was, a control so firm and unyielding that I was unable to develop into a self. There were good times, of course. I laughed. I enjoyed myself. But I also learned to predict my father’s feelings as if he were the weather. As if I could be good enough. See how I am still compelled to make excuses?

I didn’t drink alcohol until I was twenty-two. I didn’t have sex until I was twenty. I had friendships but they weren’t healthy. I had infatuations which are almost never healthy. I learned to be a person from scratch, just quite a lot later than I should have. Maybe this is true of everyone. Maybe from seventeen to twenty-one is a five year stretch of confusion and mistakes for many people. I can drive in any condition the world can throw at me from blizzards to mud to rivers, but learning to engage with other people is a skill I don’t think I’ve yet mastered. I often love in the wrong direction or shut down or just drift away. Attachment doesn’t always stick. Sometimes when I think of being a teenager, I think of my father’s anger and his finger boring a hole in my chest as he angrily jabbed at me to reinforce every point. I remember the green hallway and the wooden cabinet. I remember the shape of his fingernail and the traces of engine oil and grease from his immersion in engines. I do not remember what I had done or why he was angry. I did very little of any consequence, ever. But I remember the pain of a bruise forming. I remember not being able to say a single word. I would like to forget the answer my mother gave me when I pleaded to her for explanations: He just loves you. My mother would buy me clothes a size too small for me to wear as ‘motivation’ in the ongoing project of reducing my size. I internalised this project as an attempt to make me disappear. 

To speak your feelings out loud feels like the riskiest endeavour between people. I understand why there are entire cultures and genders built around keeping everything under wraps. To say I was silent is not entirely true. I was just buried deep. Throughout my twenties and thirties I would end up in intense relationships both romantic and platonic where I was controlling or being controlled. Controlling it by keeping my distance and throwing money into the gaps when I finally had it. Being controlled by always being there and doing whatever was needed, sometimes that’s controlling things too. Repeating patterns over and over until the next phase of the lesson was done. Each relationship an excavation. Each heartbreak the rest between digs. From this distance I can see each attempt to be the good girl, to be top of the class running through every action I take. Still trying to meet some imagined standard I never really understood. Always and always trying to be better. Always thinking there was something wrong with me. Very rarely saying anything true out loud. Very rarely asking to have any need met. Very rarely knowing anything. My own confusion and the spikiness of my anxiety making everything more and more confusing. Rejecting before being rejected. Panicking at the smallest unpredicted thing, wishing to not exist if not exactly to die. How did I even make it through those years? At almost forty I am frankly shocked to be here. The biggest surprise is continued existence.

I’ve had enough therapy to know that my parents were simply imperfect people doing their best. The same is true of everyone I’ve met in my life, including myself. I can have sympathy for the small children that still live inside all of them and inside me too. I feel certain that inside the angry father of my childhood is a scared man. He’s not angry, he’s afraid. And here I am day to day living the results of my parent’s fear. The first time I remember being sexually assaulted I didn’t even know that was what was happening. I just assumed this was some new thing to deal with. I didn’t tell anyone about it. It never occurred to me that anyone would care or that anything would be done about it. I was thirteen and I already had so little regard for myself I didn’t know I could ask for help when I was scared or confused. When it happened again when I was sixteen it still barely registered, dissociation says don’t feel anything going on down in your body. If anything I was even more convinced that it was nothing to tell anyone about. I actually said “no, thank you” to the man and managed to get away from him. How polite of me. It would only be at the age of twenty-nine I would know what happened to me and this was only after receiving training to be a domestic violence crisis line volunteer. Finally, at the age of thirty-three I would come to understand my body was my own. And that only came about because I started lifting weights. I started to build strength in my body and in my mind. Of course that didn’t stop me being sexually assaulted again, on the street or in bedrooms. It just meant that I knew what was happening and knew how to help myself. I knew enough to know I was enough. 

I remember being at a gig in Bodega sometime in 2015 or 2016. Vince Staples was playing and all night he begged the angry, largely white male crowd to take care of the women, to calm down. They didn’t listen. I lost count of the random touches, the groping that just happens when hands think they can’t be identified in a crowd. Tempting to think that my fatness would protect me from this but that’s not the case. An anonymous body is an anonymous body. I stopped drinking because it felt safer. Two women I knew left early because they couldn’t take it. I was with friends just trying to enjoy an artist I liked. Trying to dance. At some point I had made it closer to the front and happened to be near a very drunk young guy trying to start a fight with a person who did not want to fight, who really did not want to fight. I danced between them using the fact of my size to block the aggression. It only worked for a short while until the drunk guy got angry enough to rush me. And I turned around, put my hand in the middle of his chest and walked him backwards into that pole in the middle of the dance floor that always felt like it was in the way. This time it wasn’t in the way. I grabbed his wrist, and in a move I had never done before I turned him around and bent his arm up behind his back giving me complete control of him. I walked him to the bar and pressed the point of it into his sternum and asked him if he was going to walk out or if I had to walk him out. By this point he was so thoroughly emasculated he pretty much ran out of the building. I walked back to my friends and the crowd parted and clapped for me. In my head I was doing the maths on why that worked. Why did that work? He wasn’t a big guy, conservatively, I probably had twenty to thirty kilograms on him. I was heavy, sober and regularly squatting much more than my own weight, much more. My crisis brain kicked in and took over piloting my body. I didn’t feel afraid. I was in smooth and calm control for the entire incident. I felt powerful. But I also knew it only worked because he wasn’t too much taller than me, or maybe it was a total fluke, or some other thing. My brain still trying to remind me I should be afraid. Probably of myself. Definitely of myself. Absolutely of the future consequences of overestimating my own competence. When I finally learned to say no for myself I had to learn a new lesson. I had to learn more than one new lesson. I had to learn tenderness. I had to learn the gentleness that must go along with strength.

Looking at my life, I can see how fear controls all the small things. The things not said and not done. The lines and curves of decisions and things I tolerated or ignored. I don’t really know what I’m afraid of when I look at it. Fear as a habit. Fear as a learned response. Fear as plain and simple as the motions and rhythms of my body. Perhaps to get to the small bits you have to push through the heart-stopping stuff first. Burn it away like cliches including wildfire. I am afraid of not being liked but I push through that these days. I am likeable and unlikeable. I am afraid of being alone though people surround me. I think this fear is of the vestigial emotional waves of my C-PTSD, pushing me around with feelings since it can no longer paralyse me. And to recognise it is to recognise when I didn’t have the cognitive abilities to understand what and why and who I was afraid of. Just that tiny little person. Trapped in a dark cold factory. Swimming in trauma soup. Strapped into a vehicle crossing a deep river. Stunned in front of incredible patriarchal anger. That tiny little person learned to be afraid because fear helped them out. And perhaps fear still helps me out. Not in my body where almost forty years of cortisol response definitely takes its toll. But perhaps in some part of me somewhere. The part of me that is calm and centered in a crisis. The part of me that wades into situations where people need help. That part of me that keeps pushing, pushing, pushing for more. The part of me that now can open wide to love, even after all of this.