Do you know that Billie Holiday song, “Good Morning Heartache”? Lady Day’s lyrics personify the misery she feels at losing her lover, casting pain as her constant companion.
Good morning, fear.
I can’t pretend to know how life delivers comeuppance, let alone why, but I’m dogged by the feeling that I am getting mine now. In some ways, I’m a terrible sissy: no jumping off of, onto or out of moving objects for me. But I’ve never been all that bothered by my physical cowardice, consoling myself with an unshakeable belief in my emotional and intellectual courage. Bringing up the hard subject, saying the unutterable, speaking truth to power—I’m on it, and I’ve been on it since girlhood. The image of myself as not being held back by my fears is such a cherished part of my persona, I’ve clung to it for more decades than I care to recount here, mostly without a second thought.
Good morning, fear.
Now I am in a situation of such profound uncertainty that long-buried fears have oozed up through layers and layers of personal history. If I say that needing to sell a lovely, sound and reasonably priced house when even eager buyers are having trouble getting financing (and when canny ones are hoping for the bottom to fall out of the market) isn’t nearly the worst of it, you’ll begin to get an inkling. It’s one thing to read about the home equity crisis from the kind of safe space that tempts you to tsk-tsk over other people’s poor judgment, and quite another to feel oneself swept into the headlines. My story has always been one of following my own path heedless of security, and living to tell the tale. But just now I’m having trouble believing in my own exceptionalism. I wake up humming that terrible line from Lady Day’s song: “Might as well get used to you hanging around.”
I actually thought I could be through with processing my family story. Don’t laugh! There’s got to be an end to it sometime, no? But staring into the abyss of the mortgage-meltdown economy has brought it all back. You see, my boundariless and barely functional immigrant family never got the knack of American enterprise. They lived on the margins—gambling, bad checks, a ruthless if ineffective will to survive that made using other people to one’s own advantage a necessary, even acceptable practice. I got something good out of it, an ironclad commitment to virtue and the examined life. And now I’ve got something bad.
Good morning, fear.
My forebears’ world was one of diminished possibility. None of them saw much point in living beyond mere survival. They tended toward numbing pursuits, marathon card games that focused attention away from real life, at least until the debts came due; the highwire act of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul; loading the senses with distraction, as by reading pulp magazines in front of the TV with the radio on, one arm turning pages and the other propelling snacks to the mouth with the regularity of a well-tuned piston. The sources of my early resilience and optimism are a mystery and a miracle to me, but my family experienced these qualities as a reproach, ridiculing me for them: Who could be stupid enough to expect happiness in this world? Who could be foolish enough to hope to make a mark?
The antidote seemed clear. Surrounded by people whose personal horizons ended with their noses, I decided to do my part to save the wide world. Surrounded by people whose idea of human possibility was only a little greater than one might imagine for the life of a beloved animal—a roof, three squares, a little entertainment, a lifelong emotionally incestuous involvement with your immediate relations—I left, seldom looking back, always moving toward an expansive vision that gave me energy and hope.
Good morning, fear.
Now, with reality rubbing my nose in the specter of failure in so many realms, my family has come back to haunt me. Rationally, I know my resilience is intact, my capacities undiminished. But when I tune into my fear, these words form in my mind: I don’t want them to win, and I’m afraid they will. Having worked so long and hard to live fully, to resist being dragged back into the world I came from, I am afraid that all my efforts will come to naught.
Another brand of cowardice I’ve cheerfully accepted as a side-effect of artistic imagination is my inability to tolerate horror movies. I have well-balanced friends who tell me it’s an easy thing to calibrate the point where frisson becomes freakout, to water down the mix with self-soothing: It’s only a movie, nothing like this can happen in real life. But I have trouble holding the boundary between real life and the life of imagination. The slasher seems to be coming straight at me. The monster looks familiar. Even though I avoid such films altogether, I seem to have a store of horror-movie images tucked away in a corner of my brain. When I plunge deeply into the fear that I will be pulled back into the vortex of my family’s world, a zombie movie starts projecting behind my eyes: clawlike hands reach up from the grave to grab at my feet, and the faces behind them are known faces, long-dead.
Good morning, fear.
I don’t like this. I ask my friends, who faithfully read the headlines (and between the lines), not to bring me tales and observations that will fuel my fears, but sometimes, in the grip of their own terror, whistling in the dark, they can’t help themselves, or in any case they convince themselves it is for my own good. I think and talk about my fear so as to understand its origins, and that does help a little. I still feel it, but it helps to remember that a residue from the past is adding weight and energy to whatever is evoked by present conditions.
I set myself spiritual practices designed to provide support in the face of such challenges, cultivating equilibrium. People dole out a great deal of spiritual advice and as I listen, I think about how many spiritual teachers I have known as human beings, and how I have seen each and every one of them crack under strain, despite imbibing their own and their teachers’ guidance daily. I go about my business, grateful that I can do it well under the circumstances, and that strengthens me. And I remember that based on a lifetime of experience, in all likelihood, this too shall pass. On better days, I know that when it does, the tears will dry and the fear will recede into an anecdote: Boy, was I ever freaked out in the summer of 2008!
But for now, as one wise friend told me, the task is to sit with it, to try to remember that it’s not an urgent message from Truth, that it’s not even me—just something that’s happening to me. Another wise friend prescribed pleasure: experiences that remind me of who I am without the fear, and I see the value of that.
Sunbeams and scraps of cloud are playing tag outside my window right now. On my walk yesterday, I saw a forest of wild fennel, each little branch topped with a mustard-yellow flower head shaped like a tiny cypress tree. At the base of one especially healthy specimen, a plant I can’t name has taken root, sending out a profusion of gray-green leaves. They are dotted with long, slender bright red flowers, made to order for hungry hummingbirds. I think I’ll plug in my iPod and go see if the herons and egrets are out this evening.