Tag: Fear

Healthy Fear

Malignant fear shackles the spirit.

In an email to some friends, I once, and only half-jokingly, closed with the words, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” One friend, whose opinion I very much respect, responded with thoughts on how damaging fear could be; how destructive.

Her point was well-taken. Early in life I’d learned that fear shackles the spirit, limiting ambition, ability, and productivity. Unhealthy fear looms like darkness, blotting out each sunrise. Constrictor coils of fear, formed of apprehension and catastrophizing, squeeze every particle of joy from the simplest happy moment.

Malignant fear is born sometimes of abuse; other times of neglect; often from trauma. Unhealthy fear paralyzes. It is a parasitic vine destroying the very tree to which it clings, and is ultimately destructive.

Malignant fear thrives in an atmosphere of pessimistic What Ifs. “What if I don’t have enough money?” “What if someone I love becomes seriously ill, or is in an accident?” “What if I go on vacation and the pet-sitter neglects my animals?” “What if there is a tornado, a wildfire, a hurricane?” “What if I’m making the wrong choice?” This sort of fear never remembers to ask any of the positive possibilities: “But what if it’s wonderful?!” “What if I have the best time of my life?” “What if this is the perfect path for me?”

I began to recognize malignant fear in my life only after years of working on myself. Growing up in a household of addiction meant that anxiety welded itself to my personality at an early age, and perpetuated itself long past the time it should have been acknowledged and done with. A morbid fear of being alone, for instance, chained me to several very unhealthy relationships. It took me the greater part of my adulthood to finally comprehend that being alone was in no way more miserable than being in a bad relationship.

Malignant fear also kept me from speaking out endless times throughout my life when I was ill-treated. Sad to say, I’ve watched this circumstance play out in the lives of many women I’ve known. Staying with one’s abuser, accepting mistreatment as the price of companionship, is the ultimate expression of malignant fear.

Yet, despite such negative aspects, I’ve finally come to realize that not all fear is unhealthy. There does exist such a thing as healthy fear.

Healthy fear is protective and intelligent. It is built on logical, rational decisions and concern for the welfare of both self and others.

In its simplest manifestation, healthy fear keeps one from foolish physical choices. Healthy fear prevents a person from standing too near the edge of the cliff; it clicks on the seatbelt and checks the mirrors before driving away. When there is a choice to be made, healthy fear examines all the possible consequences before making a decision based on the available facts. Healthy fear focuses a realistic gaze on both the virtues and faults of a potential partner, and weighs the future in that balance.

Healthy fear declares, “I will not allow you to belittle me or treat me with anything less than courtesy, not only because I deserve respect, but because of what I might become if I permit that sort of conduct.”

Healthy fear is also, conversely, courageous. It bravely acknowledges the bad examples in life, and admits the possibility of replicating that behavior. I experienced healthy fear when I faced the truth about my alcoholic parent, read everything I could find about the genetic component of alcoholism, and, conceding the possibility that I might perpetuate that behavior, spent the first 23 years of my child’s life as a non-drinker.

There is often a fine line to walk between a determination of whether a fear is malignant or healthy. It requires soul-searching that delves into the depths of old trauma, facing long-forgotten pain, before rooting out the parasite from the symbiont.

Some say there are only two genuine emotions: love and fear. But that explanation is simplistic. Love, as well as fear, splinters into shards and factions, each mutating into something different: rich and strange, or small and cruel. Love, as well as fear, can be unwholesome and damaging. But when properly understood, acknowledged, and managed, fear can become the surprising beacon that guides our soul through the shoals of a perilous existence.

You might also enjoy the essay “The Day the Vacuum Cleaner Rose Up to Smite Me”. You may locate it by scrolling to the Archives, below; it was published on October 27, 2017.

Lilith, the Invisible Cat

§  Since beginning this blog, each year near Halloween I’ve shared a poem, always supernatural or otherworldly in nature.  I had a tough time continuing with that tradition this year!  §

Since the start of this blog in 2017, it’s been my custom to include some ghostly little poem for Halloween.  I began that tradition using a mysterious story poem that I’d written for youngsters, my great niece and nephew, titled Ghost Kitty Walks.  (They were thrilled when I sent them a print of their homemade storybook, now published on my blog.)

The following year, I continued with my “Second Annual!” Halloween tradition, using another story poem, one that I had written decades ago.  Struggling Home told an engaging supernatural tale.  But it also (as poetry often does for the soul of both author and reader) exorcised some old uneasiness and personal angst.  I’ve always thought it fitting that I began composing that poem to the rhythm of my steps one dark afternoon as I fought my way home through a torrential rainstorm, walking from a distant bus stop to my house.

Bearing those two posts in mind, in 2019 I sifted through my hundreds of unpublished poems  for a verse that I recalled having penned many years ago, Alicia Walks Softly.  This was yet another story poem, the tale of a ghost who walks nightly to weep at the site of her own grave.  It seemed appropriate for Halloween.  I wasted an hour or more poring through old ring binders and loose sheets of paper and computer files, but, unfortunately, could not find it.  I stumbled across countless verses that were indescribably awful (which sort of explains the “unpublished” part). Despite finding all those sad attempts, though, I also discovered a few poems that I had written well at surprisingly young ages.  Nevertheless, hunting for Alicia Walks Softly proved fruitless, and I realized I must have discarded it.  Sadly, I could recall only the first stanza and the final line of the poem–far too little to reconstruct it, even had I the impetus to do so–though perhaps I might, one day, attempt to do just that.

But as I sifted through reams of my old poetry, I came across one that, while definitely neither a story in verse nor a ghost poem, seemed to fit the bill for my 2019 Halloween-themed blog.  Certainly, it spoke to the seasonal topic of Halloween with its references to demons.  This time, though, the poem, Rooms of Darkness, spoke of true demons: the inescapable demons and devils of one’s heart and mind and soul; the demons that can, if we do not grapple with them, haunt us throughout our lifetimes.

Now the Halloween season of 2020 has rolled around to find me once more turning the pages of old-fashioned ring binders and searching through faint memories for something appropriate to this most disturbing of years.  I know very well that I’ve never written anything on the subject of plague…or riots and looting…or the horrific deaths of individuals at the hands of law enforcement…or entrenched racism…or wildfires burning through thousands of acres, leaving whole populations homeless and the earth scorched…or world leaders who threaten the 244-year-old history of the peaceful transference of power. Frightening as those subjects are (and they are a thousand times more terrifying than any supernatural story I’ve ever encountered), I have nothing in my accumulated verse that even remotely touches them.

In consequence, and perhaps hoping to escape some of the dreadfulness that has comprised this sad year, I find myself turning once more to a lighthearted story poem written for my great niece and nephew when they were small.  After all, The Invisible Man was once considered quite a creepy tale, wasn’t it?  So here, to give you a perhaps just the slightest smile in the midst of so much world-wide awfulness, or to provide a little story that you might take pleasure in sharing with the small children in your family is,

Pretty LilithLilith, The Invisible Cat

Lil2Small Lilith is a pretty cat,
Impeccable in grey.
Her white shirt front’s immaculate.
She’s dressed up every day

But Lilith is invisible.                Invisible.                                         Invisible.

LilithhidesSmall Lilith is invisible.
She hides herself away,
When people come to stay.
When children come to play,
Small Lilith goes away.
She hides there in the closet.
She hides there all the day.

Lil6

Small Lilith is a fraidy cat.
She doesn’t understand
That she could get soft pets and pats
From gentle, loving hands.

Lil7

And so she hides in corners dark–
In closets, under beds.
And shivers, shakes and trembles there,
And hangs her little head.

So Lilith stays invisible.             Invisible.                                       Invisible.

LilithhidesSmall Lilith stays invisible.
She hides herself away,
When people come to stay.
When children come to play,
Small Lilith goes away.

Lil8She hides among the pillows.
She hides there all the day.

The End

May your Halloween be free of both
imagined and this year’s frightfully true terrors.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like “Ghost Kitty Walks”, published 10/30/2017, “Struggling Home”, from 10/31/2018, or “Rooms of Darkness”, to be found in the Archives from 10/30/2019

A Candle in the Darkness

A few days before I was to have surgery, a close friend asked me to confirm the time that my operation would be starting. She would, she explained, be lighting a candle for me at that moment, and sending me her prayers and love.

I’ve always found that the most terrible moment of any surgery is that short, frightening journey as one is wheeled down corridors into the operating room.   The unutterable sense of loneliness cannot be described to anyone who has not had this experience.  I liken it to the final journey of death.  Friends and family in the pre-op room have hugged and kissed one goodbye, and then one is completely alone, facing an unknown.  No matter how simple the surgery, everyone experiences that nagging dread that they might not awaken from the anesthetic.  Everyone wonders if hands, feet, arms, legs, fingers, toes, will all function afterwards, or be forever paralyzed.  Everyone is aware that sometimes, in surgery, things go wrong.

Only once, as I was being taken to surgery, did the orderly pushing the gurney seek to lighten my sense of trepidation. Had I ever had surgery before, she asked, and when I answered in the affirmative, she patted my shoulder and said, “But it’s always a little scary, isn’t it?”  There are no words to describe how comforting I found her empathetic remark.

Being wheeled to this most recent surgery, I received no such comforting question or concern. I was taken a short distance to the operating room and helped onto the table.  In a surgery just two months prior, a nurse had introduced me quickly to everyone in the operating room, giving me their first names and their function in the surgery, leaving me to wonder fearfully if there would be a quiz afterwards!  This time, however, there was only the quick press of the oxygen mask over my face and the staccato instructions of the anesthesiologist to, “Breathe!  Breathe deeply!”  (Of course, since I am horribly claustrophobic, just having the darned mask pressed onto my face made me do nothing but instinctively hold my breath in complete terror, followed by the rapid-fire, quick, short breaths of a full-blown panic attack.  Perhaps this is a reaction for which anesthesiologists should be schooled in their method of approach.)

But, despite my claustrophobia, my lonely distress and anxiety, the image of my friend’s candle, burning brightly for me, shone in my consciousness. I found myself focusing on it during that brief journey to the operating room.  The image calmed me, reassuring me that I was not truly alone; that the prayers and concern of others were surrounding me.  A memory swam up into my consciousness, a poem I had written years earlier, and I found myself reciting the lines like a mantra as I was carried into the coma-like sleep of anesthesia:

Just a light left burning for me
in my window of darkest pain;
just safe harbor, refuge, retreat
sheltered sanctuary from rain.

Just a kind hand, steadying me
when I stumble a rocky path;
just a heart’s strong, balancing beat
when I settle my face at last

to the shoulder, stable and sure
of a long-cherished friend who shares
light embrace, encircling me
in the knowledge that one soul cares.

Weeks afterwards, my friend told me that the candle she lit had burned throughout my three-hour operation (which had, of course, begun later than actually scheduled). Despite guttering a few times, the candle had continued burning until a call from the phone tree assured her that I was out of surgery and doing well.

But, in my mind, that candle is still burning, guiding me through the darkness, lighting my path with the beacon of caring and friendship.