I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. And specifically about fearing the wrong things.
In order to be your best self it helps to be fearless, calm, and to see reality as it actually exists, not filtered through an adrenaline-soaked haze. When you are thinking clearly and have access to accurate information it’s easier to make sound decisions.
Easier said than done.
When you are anxious you magnify small fears, respond disproportionately to threats, and get distracted from the things that really matter to you. In its purest form, miscalculating your fears results in paranoia, fearing things that simply don’t exist.
But irrational fear also results in some of the world’s biggest ills. Bigotry, violence, hysteria.
Whether you’re a mega-bestselling author irrationally terrified by transgender people or if you clutch your wallet tightly when you walk down perfectly safe streets because of the type of person on the block (or worse), miscalculated fears can turn otherwise rational people into monsters.
Fear can even creep inexorably into the writing process. Fearing that you aren’t good enough, that people are going to respond negatively, that you’re not a “real writer,” as if such a thing even exists. There’s little that’s helpful about those fears, but as Shakespeare managed to write, “Nothing routs us but the villainy of our fears.”
To get anything done that’s worth doing you have to face fears, calm down, and focus.
But in the day of the internet, social media, and the political media industrial complex, the modern world is engineered to stop you from being calm.
Our fear is extremely profitable to the people who can provoke it. Algorithms have gotten ridiculously good at stoking our anxieties and provoking conflicts. Doomscrolling keeps entire industries afloat.
Are these times really that “unprecedented?” Is 2020 really the worst year ever? (I mean… have you even read a book about the 1800s or earlier?)
Or is everything we’re going through pretty much business as usual, only it’s packaged and injected directly into our amygdala by the politicians and companies who profit from our hijacked attention?
I honestly don’t know. It’s hard to see what’s real through the haze of our collective anxieties. This election and the pandemic could well spell the end of American democracy and we’re headed for an unimaginably bleak future. But probably not. But maybe! Let me read another article about it…
How do you calculate your fears accurately when the ground is constantly shifting under you, when anxiety is a push alert away, when the world is arrayed around you to keep you agitated? How do you even write when you don’t know what world you’re writing for and what your efforts could possibly add up to?
Joy is all around you if you’re not too agitated to see it. There’s still a future to write for.
But calm is hard to find these days. Fear is invasive and corrosive.
I at least want to see it for what it is.
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Art: John Henry Fuseli – The Nightmare
Love this very much!
I’m glad I live now and not in the past (especially anytime before novocaine and epidurals), but I do think what makes this time feel especially bleak to a lot of us is that it SHOULD be better. It feels like a backwards slide and that’s scary. How are we even considering bulldozing Alaska and taking away reproductive rights? How is it possible that this country so obsessed with freedom is so quickly normalizing authoritarianism? I have so many questions.
Anyway, I’m constantly trying to work against and negotiate with my fears. The best I can do is make my life smaller. Do my best to focus on my home and my community. Which is not to say I tune out the world–I do want to be informed (and active)–but to recognize I can only control so much.
Media stokes our fears and our divisiveness. I shut it off. We don’t have objective news reporting in our country anymore.I listen to an Australian news outlet that comments on America’s domestic and foreign policy and the current political climate. Objective yes, because they have no stake in the outcomes.
On another note, I’ve never seen a political party work so hard hating a president. Why do they do it? It’s not because the president is course and crude it’s because he didn’t climb up through the political system, therefore he owes no one a debt and he can’t be bought.
Well written, Nathan.
Human beings die from fear and anger. These are our greatest nemesis. Their opposites are our greatest friends: faith and unconditional love. The former emotions leak energy away and erode our rationality, happiness and self-esteem while faith and unconditional love give us energy through the joy they inspire. In joy is life that is self-sustaining if we could live in constant faith in the positive (outcome, etc) and trusting in God, ourselves and others. While unconditional love is found in understanding, which inspires forgiveness, which inspires affection and focusing on the feelings and needs of each other. All these states of mind enable us to feel dang good about ourselves like physical possessions can never enable us to feel on the deepest level. They are a win on every level.
Given the world we live in, and the influences we all battle, seen and unseen, control of the mind and emotions is not easy. The answer is in recognising the quality of each thought and choosing what is worthy to believe in. The negative are always a lie, and the positive are always true given the treasure chest of potential inside each of us and that our Friends in High Places are just a prayer and request away, As Jesus said, ‘With faith you can do anything.’ And ‘You have not because you ask not.’
This is good. Thanks.
Yeah, this resonates for sure. I read a few newspapers online, and that’s it for news: no tv, and definitely no social media. I teach 8th grade in the Twin Cities, and it’s been a hard start to the school year. Many kids haven’t had a chance to process anything that’s happened in our community since March, and I’m struggling to transmute my own fear into courage, wisdom, and empathy, let alone model the process for my students. It’s definitely the most vulnerable year of teaching I’ve ever had, but I’m grateful to have a reason to process my fears. It would be much harder if I felt like I was doing that emotional work in a void.
I hope you know how stunningly good this really piece is, Nathan. Thank you.
We writers often say there are no new ideas, only new combinations of them.
Most of history might be the same way. It’s still people, with the same top needs being shuffled between different priorities and given new spotlights.
Hello Nathan,
Well said.
Fear explodes into unfounded perceptions.
I stepped away from home for 3-days and surrounded myself with distractions cut off from the current events. I am back feeling recharged and ready to face the unknown near-future.
Thank you for your email/post.
Be well. Be safe.
Thank you, Nathan. Oddly enough, facing our fears, talking about them—that they even exist—helps.
“Whether you’re a mega-bestselling author irrationally terrified by transgender people or if you clutch your wallet tightly when you walk down perfectly safe streets because of the type of person on the block (or worse), miscalculated fears can turn otherwise rational people into monsters.”
Yes, some fears are irrational. But women’s fear of males – whether they are strange males in a dark alley or parking lot, or males presenting themselves as superficially feminine and entering intimate female spaces – is not an irrational fear. It is a fear based in both subjective lived experience and in the objective biological reality that some – not all, but some – males are pathologically aggressive, particularly towards women, and that, being bigger and stronger and capable of forcible penetration with a penis, are equipped to follow through on that aggression, with tragic, dehumanizing, and sometimes deadly or disfiguring results.
It is not irrational for women to have a fear of this, nor to protect ourselves, nor to ask society to provide spaces where we can be safe.
(Transwomen, who are not women, but transfeminine men, also have a right to safety, but they can make their own spaces. It is not our job to compromise ourselves to “validate” them.)
As a woman, and as the mother of three daughters, I am becoming increasingly alarmed at this recent tendency on the left to gaslight – and it is gaslighting – women and girls by shaming us into compromising our own dignity and safety for the sake of other “identities” that are, lets admit it, higher priorities than females on the progressive and intersectional hierarchy.
We are not “TERFs” and “Karens” for insisting on our own safety. And just because there are isolated incidences of women exploiting fear for selfish ends (like that lady in Central Park) does not invalidate our fears as a whole or our right to reasonably insist on our safety.
It’s a kind of misogyny. It’s being used to silence us. I find it very disturbing. I’m glad Rowling spoke out. She spoke for many of us. She is not “terrified of transgender people”; she is concerned about nebulous “Gender Theory” giving cover to deviant males who have no intention of getting actual sex change operations entering private female spaces and harming women, which is not merely theoretical, but has happened. She is also concerned about mentally ill girls being fast tracked into transition and having their bodies damaged without proper gatekeeping. This is also a rational fear, as it has also happened, and is of particular concern to me personally as a mother of daughters.
This trend on the left to marginalize women and girls when our interests don’t fit the approved “narrative” has been alarming to me for some time. I am becoming more intentional lately about teaching my daughters that reality exists, that their bodies are the right bodies for them, that males are in reality more aggressive, sexually and otherwise, than females, the the reality of sex and the differences between men and women are not “social constructs” than can be wished away, but deeply biological realities, and they need to be aware of this to be safe. I am also teaching them to put their needs as women and girls first, and to not meekly move aside for other “identities” that they are told are more important than them by people with political and cultural power.
I am also being more intentional about speaking out against it when it I see this kind of misogyny being promoted in progressive spaces. It particularly bothers me when culturally powerful men do it to signal how progressively “virtuous” they are, at women’s expense.
I’ve always liked your blog, and you have a right to your views. But I’m disappointed that you would be this casually dismissive of the safety of women and girls as “irrational.” Whether you intended it or not, calling women “irrational” is just a new form of a very old kind of misogyny.
Possessing a fear and knowing that it has an origin in lived or observed experiences does not necessarily make a fear rational. I’m not trying to dismiss people’s fears, particularly when I haven’t walked in their shoes, but past a certain point amorphous fears can quickly transform into intolerance and bigotry against an entire group, which, to be honest, I think you’ve let happen. That’s precisely how some of the world’s worst ills are concocted.
“Possessing a fear and knowing that it has an origin in lived or observed experiences does not necessarily make a fear rational.”
I am a Psychologist certified in REBT. I am very aware of the difference between rational and irrational fear. And you are right that “lived experience” is not sufficient alone. But many postmodern, queer, and intersectional activists promote it as an epistemological gold standard. The entire basis for transgender identity is subjective “lived experience”. Why do you consider the lived experiences of rape victims or women irrational, but the lived experience of someone’s “inner sense of gender” not? It is a curious double standard. Also, female fears of males are not based in personal “lived experiences” alone, but in reams of biological, psychological, and sociological data on differences in biological male and biological female physiology, crime rates, and behavior.
“I’m not trying to dismiss people’s fears, particularly when I haven’t walked in their shoes”
But this is exactly what you are doing. You are a writer. Own the meaning of your words.
“Past a certain point amorphous fears can quickly transform into intolerance and bigotry against an entire group, which, to be honest, I think you’ve let happen.”
But are they amorphous when they are supported by both subjective experience and objective evidence? Society has long recognized that there are certain biologically based differences between males and females that, in certain circumstances, requires provisions that separate them, irregardless of that male’s subjective gender identity. These provisions are neither “amorphous” nor “bigoted”, but necessary for human females, with our biologically smaller, weaker, and impregnable bodies, to have equitable and safe access to full participation in society.
“That’s precisely how some of the world’s worst ills are concocted.”
Are you comparing women being wary of males in a dark parking lot, feeling threatened by an exposed penis in a rape shelter, or drawing boundaries around who has a right to see their exposed body with the kind of bigotry that leads to things like genocide? Because that seems to be the dog whistle you are giving here.
I know that women – and men – in progressive spaces, including most of academia and the literary world, feel the need to go along with certain Ideological Orthodoxies to fit in and advance professionally. But I am 40 years old, I am on to the game, and I am not going to play it anymore. Progressive women are being used by “Intersectionality” the same way conservative women are used by the Religious Right – to abase themselves and ignore their own interests in the interest of the greater ideological “cause.”
Hard no from this woman. I dissent and I resist.
Like many before you, you’ve constructed a very elaborate basis to cloak your own bigotry against an entire group of people, most notably from yourself.