What fear made me do
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is
that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that
most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who
am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are
you not to be?”- Nelson Mandela
As
a young child, she worried where the snails went, once the rain had stopped and
heat returned. Did they overheat in those stuffy shells? She could not
understand the whispers of the leaves in the wind, and worried the trees might
be lonely. In school it became clear that the other children were not studying
the sandpit for its bigger rock origins, worrying that grains had become separated
from their family. So she learnt to hide these worries, even from herself.
Instead
the earth spoke directly to her bones, and her bones knitted their concerns
together in a tight blanket, laying it tight over her skeleton. When the
osteo-real estate became too crowded, the worry reached into the muscle itself,
nestling between muscle fibres.
In this way she remained sensitive to the turns of the earth but was no longer disturbed by intrusions into her thoughts or conversation. She became just another little girl, and instead of staring deeply into the pit she climbed up on the monkey bars. She swung and screamed, giggled and chased, and everyone thought There goes a rambunctious one.
In this way she remained sensitive to the turns of the earth but was no longer disturbed by intrusions into her thoughts or conversation. She became just another little girl, and instead of staring deeply into the pit she climbed up on the monkey bars. She swung and screamed, giggled and chased, and everyone thought There goes a rambunctious one.
As a startling child she drew everyone’s gaze but she wasn’t quite popular. In a group she didn’t quite
know how to slip into the stream, always gushing too high above causing celebrity
for a moment, or rumbling along too deep below. Standing amongst her peers, her
bones worried that she might prefer to be alone, and knitted a new blanket
around her big toe.
By
her teen years she became adept at picking up masks. She could slide well
between social groups, equally befriending the girl sitting all alone, or
sprawling on the grass with the coolest girl in school surrounded by cronies.
She relished in her mastered skill, changing her personality with her outfits.
Art by Kate Gillett |
Her bones throbbed between her muscles, like steel rods suddenly iced over. Her muscles were feverishly hot, tying themselves in impossible knots with unrelated distant neighbours. Bicep entangled itself illogically with calf, contorting her into foetal position. Her diaphragm tied itself to her pubis, dragging her breath heavy into her hips. At sweet sixteen, she felt a weariness beyond all the years of the earth. A blanket of fog swept over her sharp-witted mind like eyes closing to avert from suffering. She rolled onto her side and stared at the wall. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
Days
passed like this, into months, and then years. Her parents took her to the Doctors,
who took many tubes of blood and came back with no answers. They offered a
candy flavoured pill known as an antidepressant. But she refused. In her bones
she knew differently.
She learnt to live
with her pain. She was a good girl and did what everyone told her was wise.
She got a degree that was practical, employable, solid. She had steady
monogamous relationships with nice, respectable boys.
Without noticing it, she got the message:
Without noticing it, she got the message:
Choose something
safe and secure,
and live your
passion from there.
But what if her
passion is neither safe, nor secure, but the wild screech of the kite taking
full flight in the storm?
It began to all seem
like madness. The poor girl graduated, began to work, succeeded too. She was
intelligent, beautiful and sociable. She married the nice, respectable boy. She
went to work everyday, and most days even enjoyed it. Except that some days she
would wake too exhausted, bones throbbing like icy steel rods deep within feverish
muscles, knotting impossibly with their unrelated distant neighbour. And the
fog would move in thickly. She would switch on the TV and watch back-to-back episodes
of Mad Men.
Where was it going
to end? The long hours, the never enough. To work more to buy more to own more
and owe more. Colonising the planet with the plastic waste of an all-consuming
emptiness. In the moments before she turned from her aching body to the
TV screen and Donald Draper, she would see for a second the pitiless irony of
it all. But she could not settle her own uneasiness, and her own bitter cry for
more, more, more.
How could she turn and face her uneasiness? It required admitting that she was hungry. If she admitted that she was hungry, she would have to ask the very scary question: What am I hungry for? Which is a question to always avoid, because right on its tail comes Will I ever be satisfied? And to ask this question is to risk that the answer might be No.
No, you will never be satisfied. Never be happy. Never find peace.
And here, skulking
in the dismal depths was the dark and hidden shame, the festering suspicion
that something within her was irreparably broken. That she was not enough. That
she could not find the way. She feared that she did not know how to live.
Better to leave these
questions, the festering shame and the ghostly fears undisturbed. Better for
her to struggle on in all of her guises, in an imitation of life that she hoped
was convincing. Better to follow the advice of everyone else, for who was she to
know better?
There are too many
voices in this world that claim to know the way. And not even the way, but with
warning and measure, steer this way and that into cosy dead-ends. Caution
beyond living. The middle road, which is no road at all but an illusion that
lulls the consciousness to sleep.
Passion, destiny, the
evolutionary beckoning from the deep is risky for just how vague and ethereal
it can be. It’s nothing the mind can grasp. And in the midst of cultural norms
that establish who and how she should be, in the clamouring of everyone else’s
opinions, fears, jealousies and religious fervour, passion beckons her to wordlessly
lean in. To hear a still quiet
voice that doesn’t even speak English.
The alternative to
passion is to imitate and replicate the tried and tested routes of other
people’s lives. But this would deny the unique masterpiece. She is one of kind.
She knows to listen to the trees, the sand and the snails. This world only made
one of her. It accumulated her atoms in that concise configuration, at this exact moment in history.
The body knows its
own process. Cells live out an organic evolution they are assembled for. From
the sperm fleeing to the ova, and ova releasing itself down the fallopian tube.
A zygote knows to nestle into nourishing womb, and divide until all those
layers of epithelium, neurons and osteoblasts web themselves out to make
exactly her. As a baby she knew to cry for milk and as an infant to reach for
vertical, sitting to rolling, crawling to clambering, onwards and upwards to
walk on her own two feet. She instinctively knew to reach for the love and
comfort that knitted together her body and brain. She knew. She knew how to be
born, how to grow, to thrive, to love, to connect.
But even in the
confines of our personal dark closet behind the winter coats, it’s terrifying
to whisper just to ourselves: I believe
in you.
To have faith, that
perhaps something inside knows exactly how to unravel, how to open, how to
undo. Knows exactly how to live.
To liberate the Mad
Genius within who knows exactly how the brush strokes must fall. Who knows how to
throw paint to create the unique masterpiece that might disturb, rivet, compel,
unsettle and satisfy this world.
She had been afraid all the long years of her very
short life. But
even so, one day she turned off the TV, and quietly, gradually, crawled back
into her body. She felt the tightening of the blanket over her bones, and all
the worry that it whispered. And the fog began to thin so that she could see
more clearly.
“And the day came
when the risk to remain in a tight bud was more painful than the risk it took
to blossom.”
- Anais Nin
caitlin your words are so beautiful and so powerful, you sum it all up. I love and miss you so much!! xx pep
ReplyDeleteThanks Pep. It does my heart good to know they're touching you. Since I started writing these blogs, so many women of all ages have come forward with their own language for these same experiences. It's difficult to find our own unique way in the world...and we're the only ones who can do it.
DeleteCaitlin, it's like you're writing for "Everywoman"... I'm sure you are reaching many with your powerful and eloquent words. For me, I've finally figured out after a mental breakdown that the fear that's crippled me all these years is actually Fear of myself. .. fear that if I dig too deep I might discover a blackness, a terror of not knowing how to live... but like you I've worn many masks and finally I'm stripping away at the last one .. tiny flashes if skin are beginning to show. Skin that's raw and painful but once nurtured will be glowing... slowly slowly. It's terrifying like a new discovery. . But absolute necessary.
ReplyDeleteAh, painful, terrifying necessity. It sounds like you've done some difficult work that has brought you face to the face with the most precious thing in the world. Mental breakdown/spiritual awakening/really living. Beautiful, difficult things...
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