The Other Side of Fear

The night after my first blog post, I found myself sitting on my couch crying. A biology professor who works in Florida and Kenya had just emailed to share how much my story touched him; that he, worlds away in geography and life experience, was going through the same thing I was. I felt overwhelmed by an entirely new sensation – one of so much joy that it threatened to tear my body apart. Messages came from people I had never met offering encouragement and validating me as a writer. One reader sent me a job posting. And one of the most beautiful men I have ever met suddenly appeared in my life deeply attracted to me. “It’s happening,” I realized. “This, this is what I longed for all those years I sobbed and raged against the life I was living.” I felt like I had finally arrived.

What does one do in such a powerful and entirely alien internal landscape?   My history is one of numbing out to avoid the intense forces of feeling that seemed capable of annihilating me. When I first learned about what was happening to our oceans through nature documentaries in the 80’s, I launched a letter-writing campaign in support of dolphin-safe tuna before realizing the scale of devastation was beyond anything any one person, even the entire heart and soul of an 11-year-old, could remedy. Being still religious at the time, I prayed to God to soothe my broken heart by making me stop caring. He did.

I spent the next decade absorbed with my own pain and longing and fulfillment until my mother died.   Her loss ripped open the sack of griefs I had been carrying and I raged for a year – drinking, casual sex, starving myself, picking fights with friends, smashing cardboard boxes with big sticks. It was the first time in my life I felt out of control and it frightened me, but the rage in me was too strong for my will and I was swept away with it. I had to trust that it would end, that there was a purpose to it all, and surrender to it. In the darkest moments I remember thinking, “At least I can feel.”

The acuity of that pain has repeated only one time since, when I left my marriage. The loss of everything comforting and familiar to me, combined with facing the challenges of the world with a sense of physical isolation and emotional rawness, left me reeling. Without the routine of my job and the support of my sister and close friend, I have no doubt I would have numbed out with whiskey and flings until I had destroyed everything I had left. But being resourced enough  to peel back the layers of the material things I had lost, I discovered the griefs of my spirit and uncovered the joys I had sacrificed. The pain I felt softened and elongated. I no longer needed emergency phone calls to pull me out of fits of sobbing I was certain would drown me. Life began to feel more like a crucible with me inside – a subtle heat and pressure that was just bearable, and simply asked that I carry it through the day. This lasted for months, and during the occasional breaks when I could breathe and feel light for a few days, I had the sensation that I was being slowly condensed and solidified into something new.

At the time, I believed I was being strengthened for another test of grief, but with this recent flood of harmony and light and joy, I realize I was being fortified as a container for experience and sensation in general. As I became better able to tolerate sadness and anger, I was also becoming better able to tolerate joy and love. I realized that the sensation of pain at being stretched – and the fear that I would be torn apart by joy or be so deeply in love I would fly out of my body – felt almost identical to the pain and fear of being annihilated by grief. I assign value to these feelings, resisting the pain and seeking the joy, but in reality, they are all simply forms of energy.

I think I may understand in a small way why the old sayings tell us that what we fear most is not our failure, but our success. It was never my intention to write to gain approval, but the moment I experienced the bliss of validation, I began to hunger for more. I began feeling self-conscious about my posts, doubting my choice of topics, feeling tempted to abandon my truth in favor of what might be popular, and feeling hurt when some posts received less attention. A well-timed article on the Becoming Minimalist site about the emptiness of accolades offered me some much-needed perspective. Praise can be intoxicating, but its nature is fleeting, and I find deeper and more grounded satisfaction from the mere act of sharing publicly what is real for me, and having the courage to withstand whatever response I receive. Writing is a vital exercise in my commitment to getting to know myself and refusing to alter my truth because of either criticism, silence, or even praise.

The other side of fear is not the bliss of acceptance or self-actualization. When I faced and broke through the doubt and anxiety that tied me to the old life I had out-grown, I indeed found a thrilling sense of freedom and abundance and personal power. I also work daily against the temptation to abandon myself in order to sustain a steady flow of validation and admiration from those inspired by my journey, hungering after the pleasure and anxious that if I let the darkness edge back in I will lose all of my creative momentum. I have been tempted to cut my journey short by taking a job in my former field and have looked longingly back at the relative ease of a familiar life of despair as an escape from the now exhausting pace and intensity of new ideas, sensations, and transformation. Perhaps my most difficult task is gently encouraging myself to believe that my life has the capacity to hold even more joy, and that I have been fortified enough to sustain the effort needed to continue deeper into new territory. In the meantime, I find that plenty of old familiar conflicts and compulsions have rooted in this new earth, offering me a degree of ironic comfort.

With the arrival of a new man in my life, I am experiencing the best and worst of this dynamic. Facing my fear of dating by being fully sober when we are together, which I cannot recall having done before in my adult life, I am astonished by how much energy is moving through my body, and how many of my chakras open and close in immediate response our interactions. I feel compelled to let myself burn up and dissolve away with the thrill of it all, but that potential bliss also feels like a threat to my identity and breeds doubt, hyper-vigilance, and a desire to create artificial boundaries to slow the momentum and stay in control. Somewhere in this swirl of energy is my deepest knowing trying to come through, and my ability to hold this intensity and ambiguity is the only way I will hear her. There is no way to escape this tension permanently, and no promise of fulfillment, so the only path for me is straight through the middle with as patience, awareness, and self-forgiveness as I can muster.

As I continue to experience days of inspiring alignment punctuated by periods of disorientation and doubt, I try to stay focused on gratitude for being able to feel so much. I have found that what Brene Brown says is true. We cannot selectively numb emotion. If I avoid pain, I deny joy; if I hold onto bliss, I will not be able to release grief; and if I run from the fear of overwhelm and loss, love will elude me. Now I am tasked with deepening my endurance of what moves through me and learning to distinguish the strength of what will pass from a deeper intuition that I can trust to guide my decisions. On the other side of fear, I may find everything I was looking for, along with a whole lot I didn’t bargain for, but I am beginning to realize that I will have to let it all go, no matter what I think I have or know, over and over again. Because that’s what life requires.

Nancy

 

Guest House by Rumi

“This being human is a guest house

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.”