On learning to live with fear

“To understand your fear is the beginning of really seeing.” – Bruce Lee

Some questions I want you to think about:

• How much fear do you feel on a daily basis?

• How much of it is self-imposed, and how much is imposed upon you by external forces?

• Can you tell the difference?

• What decisions have you made, or not made, because of fear?

I’ve been asking myself these questions lately. For me, fear is always there, lurking just below the surface, but occasionally coming up for air. Sometimes, fear is a direct response, obviously brought on by stimuli.

Like, for example…

Have you seen the trailer for Skinamarink? If not, here, have a look:

It’s a 2022 Canadian arthouse horror film that is clearly going for a v i b e, and is proving divisive with audiences. I haven’t seen it. Based on the trailer, I’m not sure I want to. Something about its visual style taps uncomfortably into memory-fragments I didn’t realize were still somewhere in my brain. It surfaces a preverbal kind of fear. The fear of a mind still struggling to make sense of the world around it, and how to articulate its responses to that world.

Speaking of which, let me share something with you. This is what got me started thinking deeply about fear in the first place.

If I had to outline all the reasons why I’m proud of my seven-year-old daughter, well, we’d be here all day. But if I made a list, one of the reasons near the top would certainly be her voracious love of reading. She’ll sit quietly for hours on end, devouring novels, manga, biographies of historical figures, in Japanese and English (please feel free to send me your comments about apples and their proximity to trees). She knows kanji well ahead of her grade level. I love to see it.

In response – and in an effort to simultaneously nourish this love of reading while also battling the dread demon Screen Time – my daughter’s amazing mom has ordered her a subscription to The Asahi Shimbun’s children’s newspaper. It’s delivered to us daily, and covers a wide variety of topics, from sports to government affairs, written in a style targeted toward elementary school students. It’s also secretly of great interest to me, because it provides the phonetic reading of some really difficult kanji combinations, which is something I still struggle with.

While I may have been drawn to this kids’ newspaper at first for that phonetic refresher, I found myself getting quite pulled in by the stories being told. A sense of curiosity about the world around me, which had lain dormant, was stirred back to life. What’s going on here? I thought.

Here’s what was going on there: I was reading about interesting current events happening in the world, presented without a veneer of fearmongering, grisly details, doom or gloom. Imagine that!

The sad fact is, sometime around 2019 or 2020, I made a concerted effort to stop consuming news media because so much of it involved reportage of salacious crimes, societal decay and celebrity scandal. So much of it, in other words, made me afraid to be alive. This was a hard decision to make, because I like to stay informed, and to be challenged by new ideas. After habitually consuming “the news” for decades, I wondered if I would transform into a socially-stunted moron as a result of filtering it out. (I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to be the judge. (I wouldn’t trust my opinion. I don’t even read the news.))

Delighted as I am at the prospect of my daughter developing and maintaining curiosity about the world she’s growing up in, that delight comes with a tainting apprehension: It’s only a matter of time before the media she consumes starts being laden with reasons to be concerned.

Let me take a step back. Clearly, there are a great number of genuine, legitimate reasons to be concerned right now. The planet is on fire. Wars continue to be waged for ridiculous reasons. AI is going to replace us all (which may actually fix the first two problems I’ve listed here).  

Hopefully I won’t come off too tinfoil-hat conspiracy-theory if I suggest that consuming mass media news coverage or social media content probably has a direct correlation to the amount of fear the average person feels. Fortunately, that’s a variable most of us can probably control, if we choose to.

Of course, there are other sources of fear, and these, depending on our circumstances, may or may not be within the realm of our ability to influence.

What is the correct response to fear? Sure, you can fight it or, uh, flight it(?). You can try to ignore it and hope it goes away. Probably the best long-term strategy is to learn to live with a certain degree of fear, and to maintain a healthy relationship with it. I’m not suggesting that we should resign ourselves to fear or become numb to it. I merely think most of us could stand to become more cognizant of our own unique relationship to fear, its sources, and our responses to it. For fear comes in many forms.

Fear as fun

When you’re a kid, and your imagination is running on high at all times, it’s a thrill to experience fear. It’s a way of finding out what your boundaries are, and how far you can push them. It’s staying up late with the movies you know you’re really not ready to watch and watching them anyway. It’s sharing urban legends with your friends after the sun’s gone down and then having to walk home alone. It’s learning that the world contains more than you’d ever thought possible—and then coming to terms with your place within it.

I used to find excitement in immersing myself in horror fiction. Then I had children, who brought with them sleepless nights, previously unknown threats to my sanity, and the sheer terror of knowing you’re responsible for another human life. I don’t need horror fiction anymore.

Fear as the mind-killer

As you get older, you start to realize not only just how much about the world you don’t know, but how much can’t be known. By anyone. None of us ever knows with 100% certainty what happens next. Fear is a valid response to that unknowability. But it can’t be the only response.

I’ve entered and subsequently destroyed relationships out of fear. I’ve taken jobs I really shouldn’t have, for fear of what would happen if I didn’t. I’ve stayed in jobs for that same reason. And I’ve also stopped myself from even applying to jobs I might have loved, out of fear that I’d be exposed as a fraud.

Fear as motivation

When fear of the unknown is tempered by excitement, and a willingness to take risks, and a support network in place in case of failure, it can lead to absolute magic.

I was scared as shit about moving to Japan, scared to drive my car on the highway for the first time, scared to ask my now-wife out on our first date. I was scared about starting this newsletter. Every winter morning when I wake up before the sun, my bones creak with a cold and deep fear that feels primal and crippling and makes me want to hide in a subterranean cave until spring.

But somehow, I’ve proven to myself that those fears can be overcome. I will live to fear again. For at least as long as centipedes continue to exist.