Fear Itself

It's so nice when synchronicities happen. Sometimes, when I'm reading a few books at once, certain ideas from one book will seem to somehow spill over into another, as if the two books want to help me keep their contents fresh in my mind by cooperating with each other. That way, each book gets more neural pathways in my brain and therefore more chance of my putting its ideas to use. It really is a good way for the universe to get me to notice something.

I've been reading this one book called Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life by Ezra Baydra. It's all about how to take what one gains from meditating regularly "off the mat" and into daily life. This passage about the importance of humour from the "Practicing with Distress" chapter recently struck me as significant:

"Once when my Pandora's box [of stressful problems] was opening wide, I went to Joko [Beck, his Zen teacher] to describe what was happening. I felt dark and grim and was embarrassed to reveal that I was experiencing so much fear. She smiled at me and said, "That's pretty interesting. Let's look at this." I got the sense that it wasn't me we were talking about but just "stuff." Here was a wider perspective. It's not that the fears were an illusion and could therefore be ignored, but that they were simply my particular conditioning. Putting them in this context allowed me to look more lightly at "my fears." I even saw the humor in the fact that my father, in repeatedly quoting to me the line "There's nothing to fear but fear itself," had succeeded in convincing me that I should be afraid of fear—quite the opposite of his benign intention. Cultivating humor and a larger perspective was instrumental in helping me to emerge from what had been a lifelong tunnel of fear."

Then last night I was reading a chapter of The Pale King about a 12-year-old boy who would break out into embarrassing sweats in public for no good reason, and I came across this:

"What he thought of as easily the worst day of his life so far followed an unseasonably cold week in early November where the problem had started to seem so manageable and under control that he felt he might actually be starting to almost forget about it altogether. Wearing dungarees and a rust-colored velour shirt, he sat far from the radiator in the middle of a middle row of student desks in World Cultures and was listening and taking notes on whatever module of the textbook they were covering, when a terrible thought rose as if from nowhere inside him: What if I all of a sudden start sweating? And on that one day this thought, which presented mostly as a terrible sudden fear that washed through him like a hot tide, made him break instantly into a heavy, unstoppable sweat, which the secondary thought that it must look even creepier to be sweating when it wasn't even hot in here to anyone else made worse and worse as he sat very still with his head down and face soon running with palpable rivulets of sweat, not moving at all, torn between the desire to wipe the sweat from his face before it actually began to drip and someone saw it dripping and the fear that any kind of wiping movement would draw people's attention and cause those in the desks on either side of him to see what was happening, that he was sweating like crazy for no reason. It was by far the worst feeling he had ever had in his life, and the whole attack lasted almost forty minutes, and for the rest of the day he went around in a kind of trance of shock and spent adrenaline, and that day was the actual start of the syndrome in which he understood that the worse his fear of breaking into a shattering public sweat was, the better the chances that he'd have something like what happened in World Cultures happen again, maybe every day, maybe more than once a day—and this understanding caused him more terror and frustration and inner suffering than he had ever before even dreamed that somebody could ever experience, and the total stupidity and weirdness of the whole problem just made it that much worse.

"[...] He could not understand why he was so afraid of people possibly seeing him sweat or thinking it was weird or gross. Who cared what people thought? He said this over and over to himself; he knew it was true. He also repeated—often in a stall in one of the boys' restrooms at school between periods after a medium or severe attack, sitting on the toilet with his pants up and trying to use the stall's toilet paper to dry himself without the toilet paper disintegrating into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead, squeezing thick pads of toilet paper onto the front of his hair to help dry it—Franklin Roosevelt's speech from US History II in sophomore year: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. [Emphasis in original.] He would mentally repeat this to himself over and over. Franklin Roosevelt was right, but it didn't help—knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn't make the fear go away. In fact, he started to think that thinking of the speech's line so much just made him all the more afraid of the fear itself. That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which was ridiculous and weird."

Pretty good coincidence, right?

Incidentally, this type of fear-of-showing-fear, bootstrapping, unwilled but conscious behaviour recently happened to me, not with sweating, but with blushing. I was in a hospital waiting room with Alison, where she was having some semiroutine testing done, and the nurse called out the name "Heather Faulkner." I looked up immediately, because I had known a Heather Faulkner in junior and senior high school, and had in fact had a huge and not very secret but unfortunately unrequited crush on her. The woman who got up and followed the nurse out of the room was, I could now see, the same Heather Faulkner. She looked a lot older and I probably wouldn't have even recognized her without being forced to look up at her and determine whether it was Heather. But I was forced, and I did look up, and I did recognize her, and she recognized that I recognized her and smiled a little inscrutable smile without returning my gaze, which was in fact part of how I recognized her.

I asked Alison whether she thought I should say hi when Heather came back, and she said of course I should. But when Heather did return I wasn't looking up and didn't notice until she'd sat down across the room from me, again without looking at me. Alison was gone herself at that point, and I'd missed my opportunity, so I continued reading my book while trying to figure out how best to negotiate the reintroduction.

Then I suddenly thought, "Wouldn't it be hilarious if I started blushing now, the way I used to uncontrollably when I was a teenager? Good thing that doesn't happen anymore." That thought was immediately followed by the thought that no, it wouldn't actually be funny at all, it would in fact be downright horrifying, so I'd better not even think too much about it because I remember that it used to be very possible to make myself blush just by thinking about how embarrassing it would be to be noticed blushing. And then of course I felt that old familiar heat rising up my neck, which caused a mild panic at the thought that there might already be a bit of ridiculous, visible redness, which brought the heat farther up into my head, etc., etc., until I could feel that my whole face had become a blinding purple and might as well be a high wattage lightbulb.

The only way I could think of to keep my head from actually exploding was to look demonstratively at the clock, feign remembering something, and walk very quickly out of the waiting room and down the hall. For some reason, my shoes made a really loud squeaking sound all the way to the elevator.

I went downstairs and bought some snacks. When I got back to the waiting room, Alison had just gotten back too. She was happy to see the snacks. Heather was still sitting across the room, but she was soon told she could leave, which she somehow managed to do with even less than the zero amount of looking at me she'd already done, but also with still the same inscrutable smile that I now didn't find nearly as charming as I had thirty years ago. I wish now that I had gotten over myself and just said hi, how's life, nice to see you again. She deserved that much, and I really would like to know how her life has gone, and it even was nice, for a minute, to see her again. But at the time all I could think was "Good riddance," as I sank into my chair, pale and exhausted.