Tag: Fear

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Riding the Brakes

IMG_1313Remember how Wile E. Coyote keeps running straight ahead for a few feet after he’s left the cliff edge behind? That’s how I fell off a horse named Omega in 1994 and got this long scar that runs from my palm, halfway up my left forearm. I could clear the jump until the second that I realized I couldn’t clear the jump; that’s when Omega put his head down and I tumbled over it into the soft dirt of the arena.

That’s how I come down the big human roller coaster hill on the bike trail: certain I can’t do it. My friend Tammy flies ahead, working out her own downhill demons while I lag behind. The bumpy pavement surprises me. Going up, I moved slowly enough not to notice how rough it is. Coming down, though, it jars my head in my helmet, just the encouragement I need to tighten my hands and squeeze the brakes.

This fear of speed is nothing new. When I turned forty, I went skiing for only the second time in my life. My friend took off for the big-girl slopes while I signed up for a lesson. All around me, little kids in parkas bounced and hopped and swerved down the hill like an avalanche of gumballs.  I picked my way through them (by which I mean I went straight and hoped they wouldn’t knock me over), intent on mastering the snowplow.

Even as a kid, I picked the slow route. There were two ways to sled-ride from the top of Marvle Valley Drive to the bottom. The first was to sally through the yards, each one connected to the next by a small hill, a mostly flat front yard, and a driveway. (Some of those driveways, like ours, were red-dog in those days, so they slowed you down nicely!) The second way was to fly right down the steep road and hope there were no cars coming down Dashwood when you reached the bottom and careened across the street into the Buckley’s front yard. I don’t have to tell you which route I took, do I?

Earlier this summer I thought I could think my way out of some of my fears. Here’s one of the things I tried:

(A Partial List of) Things I’m Afraid Of:

Spiders in the shower
Moving (or playing music) fast
Touching dead things
Buildings/Bridges/tunnels collapsing
Car accidents
Heights
Talking politics with people I’m related to
Flying

Then I made this list.

(A Partial List of) Things I’m Not Afraid Of:

Public speaking
Taking up the violin in my forties
Leaving well-paying jobs that don’t feed my heart
Signing up for a triathlon when I’m out of shape
Getting my shoes dirty
Lizards
Talking politics with people I’m not related to

I thought maybe I could figure out why I’m not afraid of the things on the second list and apply that logic to talk myself out of being afraid of the things on the first.

Then I watched my grand-daughter ride the Cliff-Hanger at Uncle Cliff’s. The ride lifts you 120 feet into the air and then drops you straight down.  At nine, Aurora is terrified to speak to most people, but she’ll shinny straight to the top of the rope at the gym, and she loves thrill rides. Her tiny feet dangle over the edge and she smiles her own cryptic Mona Lisa smile as she ascends into the sky and plummets down.

Where does fear come from, anyway? How come I got heights, Aurora got speaking, and my husband got water?

Just before school started, I spent a day with teenagers at a ropes course deep in the Manzano Mountains. My group of about two-dozen ninth graders was standing at the base of a tall pole capped by a tiny platform. The two girls who had volunteered to go first were suited up in harnesses and helmets. The first girl climbed straight up the pole and maneuvered easily onto the platform, some thirty feet in the air. The second girl also flew to the top; then she struggled a bit to climb onto the platform with her friend.

As an onlooker, I stand below, halfway hoping they will chicken out before I have to watch them leap from the platform, aiming for the tiny trapeze dangling nearly out of reach in front of them.

Of course they don’t chicken out. As they begin their count to three (one-two-three-jump, is the sequence the course director has drilled them on), I can hear the extra air in the voice of the girl who is afraid. I want to beg them not to jump, but that’s not the point of this morning, so instead I hope their belayers know what they are doing, that they got enough sleep last night, that they didn’t fight with their wives this morning. I hope the ropes hold and that the kids have put their harnesses on right, and by the time I’ve gone through this litany of fears, before I even have time to get to the end of The Memorare, my go-to incantation when I’m afraid, these two beautiful children have leapt into the sky and are dangling high above the ground, swaying and laughing in the cool, piney air.

At this point, as the (attentive) belayers gently lower the (safely harnessed) girls to the ground, a line from Kurt Vonnegut starts following me around.

If you’ve never had a quote follow you around, it’s just as you’d imagine it. Really. A little thought bubble pokes its way out of your shoulder and hovers in the air just beyond your left ear, sometimes for weeks, until you finally take those words into your life and figure out why they are haunting you. This one says, Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

I realize I’m not going to be able to think my way out of my fears. When I first got married, I remember being a little bit afraid every time my husband left the house; for some reason, he seemed newly fragile. I wanted to follow him into the world each day and see him safely home. At some point, I forgot that fear is something that most people try to overcome; I set a generous place for it at the table. I was grateful to it for keeping my feet on solid ground. I was comfortable with the way it manifested in my stomach, in the shake in my voice, in a coldness in my hands. I even learned to feed it, imagining plane crashes, tunnels caving in, and other disasters on demand. I had decided, as I wrote in a poem, “to try like hell to stay alive.”

For a long time I wasn’t aware that I had donned a life-jacket, but even now it seems a not completely unreasonable reaction to the world.

The quote bubble hanging by my ear is getting annoying, so I finally pull Slaughterhouse Five off the shelf to refresh my memory. I’m not thrilled when I realize my quote is an epitaph Billy Pilgrim imagines for himself. In the book, it’s etched on a picture of a tombstone.

It’s not the quote I’d pick to sum up my life today, although I think it describes the world I spent a long time trying to live in.  It’s not too far off; I could live with, “It was beautiful and it hurt,” or “It was so beautiful that it hurt.” Or maybe if I’m writing my epitaph, I should keep the line I wrote one grade school Halloween: “Here lies Heather, under the weather.”

That still makes me smile.

There’s no rest when the first two girls are safe on the ground. The next pair is already clipped in to their harnesses and starting up the pole.

I’m thinking that maybe you have to let the world toss you around a little. I’m thinking that next time I ride down the bumpy bike trail, I might try to wait a few seconds before I start squeezing the brakes. I’m thinking about that moment just after you run over the edge of the cliff, before you realize you will have to fall. I’m thinking that that’s the space, out there for those few seconds in clear air where everything is beautiful, in which we live our lives.

Recently I got an email from an old friend who has been on her own journey out of loss into love. I’ve known Jacqui since the first day of first grade, and she has been telling me that we should go for a hot air balloon ride when we turn fifty.

I wouldn’t want her to read this essay and think I have decided I want to go for that ride. It’s fair to say, though, that lately I’ve been wondering what’s out there, just over the edge.

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Walnut

If you follow the Bosque Trail along the Rio Grande south past the Nature Center, you’ll eventually come to an intersection with a cute little mini-street sign. Here you will have to make a decision. You can continue south toward Tingley Beach all the way past Rio Bravo if you’re in the mood for an out and back ride. Or, if you are a teacher, and it’s June, and you want to satisfy your curiosity about whether this trail links with Unser, you can turn right, take the I-40 trail to the west, and see what happens.

I feel like a human roller coaster as soon as I make the turn. Here the trail, its own mini-road, rises parallel to the highway. An orange metal rail swoops playfully alongside all the way across the river. My new light bike says click click click click click as I pedal up the narrow track. It’s a smaller version of the sound the Thunderbolt makes at Kennywood Park as it begins its long ascent to the top of the first hill. The ground falls away as I look up and up and up toward the cliff on the other side of the river.

As I pump into the sky, I feel a little bit like ET pedaling into the clouds. First the bosque drops away beneath me, the Rio Grande reveals its muddy bottom, and then I soar over the top branches of cottonwoods on the west bank.  Finally, I chug alongside the cliff, rising to the top where I can almost look into the windows of that house with the big Christmas light display every December.

No one passes me on this roller coaster; I’m the only one with a ticket today.

Now might be a good time to mention that I don’t particularly care for roller coasters. I’m terrified of heights. I don’t see any good reason to be up in the air if I could be down on the ground.

Rather than getting more reasonable as I’ve gotten older, my fear has grown to encompass more things. I used to be afraid only when a situation was out of my control. I could climb a ladder, for instance, or traipse along a mountain ledge, or walk out and peer over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge near Taos without any trouble.

It wasn’t until bridges started collapsing on CNN that it occurred to me to be afraid of bad engineering in every day structures. Now I don’t pull into a parking garage or drive through a tunnel without, at least for a moment, wondering if they will collapse. Likewise, I prefer upper decks of sports stadiums, assuming that it would be better to be on top than underneath if a structure came crashing to the ground.

Fortunately, these fears aren’t debilitating. For the most part, I park where I have to, drive across bridges, ride the tram when I have company in town, and live alongside these fears with little impact on my daily life.

Nevertheless, as I start up the I-40 trail, I feel the familiar wobbliness kick in.

In “The Neurobiology of Fear,” Laurel Duphiney Edmundson (whom I quote in part because I find her name delightful) notes that “the animal fear response,” which she describes as an “unspecific physiological response” is just the beginning of what happens when our bodies perceive danger. It precedes a “slower, more detailed psychological assessment of the situation, during which the individual [that would be me, on my bike on a bridge] becomes conscious of feeling afraid.”

Almost simultaneous with the wobbly feeling, I do exactly what science predicts. I think, “Huh, I am getting higher and higher above the river,” which is really cool, and “I’m terrified,” which I think I would like not to be.

For some reason, I find it comforting to know that something like my fear of heights exists in animals. Duphiney Edmundson explains that my physical response comes from “the walnut-sized structure in the forebrain called the amygdala.” I also find it comforting that she describes my amygdala as “walnut-sized,” rather than golf-ball or hailstone or brussels sprout-sized.

When I look down from that bridge, my amygdala gets busy. First, it “stimulates the hypothalamus to produce corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH).” This release “triggers the pituitary gland’s discharge of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which in turn stimulates the adrenal gland to secrete cortisol. Cortisol in the bloodstream causes an increase in glucose production, providing the necessary fuel for the brain and muscles to deal with stress.”

Cool, isn’t it?

Finally, “After passing through the amygdala, sensory information is sent on to the cortex” where “the frightening stimulus is examined in detail to determine whether or not a real threat exists.” I recognize this final stage. This is when I look down at the ground from the bridge and wonder if this web of concrete might actually fall into the river. My cortex being my cortex, not that of a more reasonable version of the species, gathers every image of a collapsing highway I’ve ever seen and decides that, yes, this bridge might fall down while I’m riding across it.

This morning (spoiler alert: the bridge still stands) I was reading an essay on a blog I follow, (zenhabits), in which Leo Babauta was explaining how to deal with a different anxiety. He advises, “Don’t fear it, don’t try to kill it. Instead, give it a hug. Embrace it. Accept it. Get used to it. You’re together for the long haul.”

He didn’t add, “Be grateful for it,” but he might have.  When I reach the top of the hill, I am exuberant. I am proud of my lumpy body for pedaling me up that trail. As I think about it further, though, it occurs to me that riding up that long hill was easy, and I mean easy in a way it had no business being for a minimally fit person who didn’t bring enough water twelve miles into a bike ride on a hot day with a headwind.

I realize now that it was my little walnut-sized amygdala, flooding my bloodstream with cortisol and increasing my glucose production, that propelled me up that hill. It was my fear that powered my legs and kept them pedaling. I hope I remember, the next time I feel that wobbly sensation or need to outrun a wooly mammoth, to be grateful.

I’ll have a chance soon. My friend Tammy suggested we bike up the bridge and then whoosh back down the next time we ride together.

You know, down, where you pick up speed and can see the ground rushing up at you the whole time. My cortex is already afraid.

I’ll let you know if the little walnut cracks.

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Read more about “The Neurobiology of Fear”  

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Marrow

I found the dead robin in the loft in front of the wine cellar a few weeks before my uncle died. I had come upstairs to get a sauvignon blanc, not to contemplate mortality, yet there she lay, still and harmless as a kicked-off shoe. She didn’t have a mark on her, which made me certain that my golden retriever not only hadn’t brought her in to the house, but didn’t even know she was here.

We make up myths to explain the inexplicable, so here’s mine: The bird walked in through the doggy door one quiet morning when no one was home. She might have been dizzy, having flown into a window. She might have seen the dog walk through the wall and been curious. She might have grown tired of a crow pestering her, or maybe she just wanted some shade.

Inside, she wandered around the house for a while, flapping up through open space, gaining altitude. There are thirty-two windows in my house. Seeing sky in so many places, she got confused. At last she decided the only way out was through the glass door at the eastern end of the loft. She soared into air gone strangely solid, staggered back a few feet, and died.

My husband wasn’t home when I found her, so I pulled a baby gate across the doorway to the loft to keep death in and the dog out, and went downstairs, wineless.

I am afraid of dead things.  More precisely, I’m afraid of dead things in my house. Outside, in the world, I’m curious about the oddly tilted neck of the goose in the ditch, the hollowed out beaver on the trail, the fossilized lizard in the fountain. But here, inside my house, I’m totally freaked out.

Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but late last summer, wild things kept coming inside. We have a doggy-door that’s covered by a simple flap of carpet. For fifteen years, other than the time the neighbor’s jack russell terrier sauntered in while we were eating spaghetti (sensing correctly that my father-in-law would share his supper) and the time a squirrel peeked in but ran when I yelled “no,” and the time the beagles threw a party for a big black cat, it has served as a surprisingly sufficient barrier to keep the outside world outside.

Last August when the first mouse came in, I saw him slant-wise. He was there and not there, felt more than seen. I was just about to remind my husband of that time in the old house when a giant centipede skittered across the tile when the mouse made a run for it.

Mouse removal isn’t the sort of thing either of us is good at. Over the next twenty minutes, we managed to chase him out from behind the love-seat, around the room, and into the piano, where none of our ill-chosen tools (broom, dustpan, salad tongs, pancake flipper) proved useful either for catching him or scaring him out of the house. Finally, he escaped into another room where we lost his trail.

The next day, I did what I always do when I’m confronted with wild things I don’t understand. I went to my school to ask a science teacher, and came home on a kill mission. It turns out someone has actually built a better mousetrap, so after almost losing a few fingers to an old wooden one, I went to Home Depot and bought six little white plastic traps. Lined up on the kitchen counter, my weapons looked more like a row of tiny toilets than an arsenal.

Fred was on his way out of town, so after I smeared the traps with peanut butter and set them around the baseboards, he knocked on the neighbor’s door to arrange my disposal crew. Chuck, the neighbor, rolled his eyes. I know this because he rolled his eyes again when I rang his doorbell the next morning to ask him to throw my dead mouse away, and yet again when I recoiled as he tried to hand me the used mousetrap, sans mouse.

Two more mice came in alive and went out dead. While I grew efficient at trap placement, I never was able to throw the dead mouse away or to reuse a trap that had killed a mouse.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m afraid to touch these dead things. It isn’t about anything rational, and it’s not a superficial squeamishness. It’s deeper than that, more intractable; it’s monsters in the closet, trolls under the bridge. I know that if I hadn’t had a neighbor willing to throw the mouse away, I would have closed that bedroom door, sealed the opening beneath it with a towel, and left the carcass there until my husband got home. I am terrified to feel the weight of death in my hands.

Like so many other fears, naming it doesn’t make it go away. To understand isn’t necessarily to overcome. I keep tugging on the thread of this fear, trying to unravel the string back to a source. Today it leads me to a photo: a four-year old stands by a rosebush, reaching toward it. In one memory of this picture, an older brother is chasing me around the yard. In another, I’ve just put down the hose, which, I’m told, I would hold for hours, mesmerized by the flow of water.

Something about that little girl’s expression makes me think she was both living in that moment and already writing its story, that she was not just laughing at the water flowing from the hose, but capturing it, wondering about it, and preparing herself to report back to anyone who would listen that water comes out of a hose and turns into a rosebush.

Kafka explains this little girl to me when he says, “I have never understood how it is possible for almost everyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of undergoing them.” He might have substituted “joys” or “loves” for “sufferings” if he had lived a happier life. I don’t know when I first realized I had a job in the world, that it would be my place not just to be, but to observe and to tell, to “objectify [my] experience” even as I was busy living it, but when I look at that little girl, I think she knew.

It’s dangerous, though. What if there are things you are afraid to know, like the weight and warmth of a dead bird in your hand? What if you are unwilling to go near the things that disturb you, like small dead animals in your home? What if you are too small, and the world is too big, and you decide to keep your art at a distance? What if you keep objectifying without writing?

Since art is how you were built to live, you end up, without ever planning it, keeping your whole life at a distance. You develop a limp, one foot walking on the path leading you to write, to be who you are built to be, one stepping safely on the same path you think everyone else is on. Your massage therapist confirms it: one leg has grown shorter than the other, one hipbone tilts awry.

It turns out this is an essay about art. We make up myths to explain the inexplicable, to help us tell the truth about the world. I have been trying to explain to myself why for so many years I lived without being claimed by writing. That objectivity that I mastered young lets you zoom out, live at a distance, while writing, if you do it, pulls you back in to the marrow. Kafka called a “non-writing writer” a “monster courting insanity.” Perhaps he meant a woman who might just begin screaming if she has to touch a dead robin by the wine cellar.

I don’t know if I have figured anything out here, or if I have said anything that will help anyone else figure anything out. I’d like to think I have. I do know that when Fred got home, it took him about twenty seconds to don a work glove, pick up the dead robin, and toss her in the trash outside.

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Strong

Tonight when the big orange dog jumped up on the leather couch he couldn’t settle. He’s a lanky dog, so sometimes he can’t quite maneuver himself into a comfortable position. The problem is this: after he turns south and shakes, and then turns north and rubs his head on the back cushion, and then twitches his back paw and turns south again, thinking perhaps he’ll lay his head on the arm rest instead of in my lap, his fur has gone all static electric wild, and he’s totally freaked out. You can practically see the sparks shooting and his synapses shorting, and you just can’t figure out how to help him. (And if you are thinking that at this point a rational person would instead be thinking about how to get the big hairy dog off the couch, I get it. But that’s not the house I live in.)

Tonight as his fur splays out in an electric halo, I hear myself tell him, “Just give up and lay down.”

Just give up and lay down. They are the kind of words that hang around in the air after you say them, determined to mean more than you intended. You keep humming them like the first three notes of a song you used to know, until your neurons get their act together and you remember that once on a very bad day, a very good priest said, “Don’t be strong.”

Seriously? I like strong. Strong is easy. Strong is cry later in your car. Strong is keep showing up on time. Strong is put the dishes in the dishwasher, prep for class, get the laundry done. Strong is “Good, thanks, and you?” or “I’m ok. Really.”

Strong is when your voice doesn’t catch when you find yourself reading out loud this line, spoken by the irritating mother in The Sound and the Fury, who, having lost her son Quentin to suicide, realizes her granddaughter Quentin is missing and says, “Where’s the note? When Quentin did it he left a note.” Strong is reading straight on through to the next sentence, without your students seeing that your heart is now on the outside of your body, all static electric wild.

I like strong.

Sometimes, though, words are spells.  When the priest said “Don’t be strong,” I stopped being strong. I cried outside under the cottonwoods. I cried in the classroom. I cried in the church and in the cemetery and in the morning and on Thursdays and when birds startled out of trees. I cried when Orion appeared on the horizon and when the cranes flew in. I wasn’t strong.

In 1994 I tumbled over a horse’s head and shattered my wrist. A great surgeon pinned my bones to a plate and stitched me back together. I remember walking through O’Hare Airport before it was fully healed; all I wanted to do was to protect it, to hold it close to me like a little broken bird. But I was strong, and I had somewhere I was supposed to be, so I had gotten on the plane. I remember how all the people around me looked like weapons; I clenched my body against them, the way morning glories fold their petals as the light wanes.

It doesn’t work like that when you’re not being strong. You don’t have any petals to close. You walk through the world without any skin, as though you’d just had your chest cranked open for heart surgery and the surgeon has forgotten to sew you back up.

When you’re not being strong, everything hurts. Things that happened decades ago when you were being strong sense your weakness and rush back to hurt you all over again. Things that haven’t even happened, like when the kind looking man at church tells you he’s come here to kill Satan today, hurt you as much as if he had actually taken a gun out of the little gun-sized pouch on his back and begun killing the people you love. When you’re not being strong you learn to call these sorts of moments trauma.

When you’re not being strong, you don’t just relinquish the job of protecting yourself from the world; you also relinquish the job of protecting the world from itself, which you hadn’t even known you’d been trying to do. You see this in the shape of your shoulders. Months later, when you have forgiven yourself for all the pain in the world, you actually choose to keep your chest cranked open and decide not to step back into your skin. You see pale green top the trees and marvel at how well the world has spun on without your constant attention.

My words don’t have the same incantatory power over the dog. He jumps off the couch, heads outside to bark and sniff for a while, and finally comes back in. This time he lands the sweet spot on his first try. As I write, his head is in my lap and I’m bending my arm at a funny angle to type around an ear. Every now and then he nudges my laptop, as if to push it away and nuzzle closer. “Give up,” I think he’s trying to tell me. “Lay down.”

(Oh, and one more thing in case it’s been a long time since you’ve read The Sound and the Fury. The second Quentin didn’t commit suicide. She escaped out the window and shinnied down Caddy’s plum tree. Life came and called her, and she ran.)

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