So, what are you afraid of?

A friend is explaining to me what she's really afraid of, underneath: the thing that lurks below all the other things and creeps behind your ears when all is quiet. Her deep fear, she tells me, is of becoming insane. This woman is extremely, extremely intelligent, and dearly loves thinking, talking, discussing, arguing, interrogating ideas. It terrifies her to imagine losing her mind. But she also seems fascinated by this realisation. She seems somehow to delight in what she's saying, and as she describes losing all grip on reality she seems to tremble with excitement.

We're in a cafe in Cambridge: the Costa on Sussex Street, where she and her best friend used to have coffee nearly every morning and I often drifted along, not exactly invited, not exactly unwelcome, trying to be part of their conversations. We're sitting halfway down the long side by the window, not in the back corner like usual. Pale cafe latte in tall glass facing black americano in white cup, mine. It's spring, 2009. I remember the conversation that day so clearly, because I had absolutely nothing to say.

I had no idea what she was talking about. I had never thought about fear. I didn't understand her fascinated trembling. My seat started to become somehow uncomfortable, as if something in my legs would really rather get up and leave. My thumbs and second fingers began secretly pressing against each other, as if exactly this pressure was keeping her words in their correct order, as if without it they would become a chaotic mess, their meaning tumbling out from inside the letters. My lips were pressing together too, and my tongue pushed against the back of my throat, closing it off. I put coffee inside to try to loosen the whole thing, but nothing seemed to change. The other people in the cafe were all talking and laughing and the noise was pushing my shoulders together and hacking at my temples. She was still talking, about how for many people this deep fear is of death, but not for her... and what about me, she was asking now: what are you afraid of?

My mind was completely blank. I supposed I probably wasn't afraid of anything. Part of me leaned back in the chair in some kind of satisfied smugness: an almost imperceptible raising of one eyebrow and a mildly amused disdain of fear, as if it was something I was above, didn't bother with. Another part knew this was just a front, and crouched inside the smugness in a tense ball with wide and slightly panicked eyes. I couldn't at all imagine what she meant by fear. What was she talking about? Had I completely missed out on something? Was something happening that I had no idea about? Perhaps there was something entirely unknown lurking around inside of me. My skin started to prickle. Something started slowly twisting into a knot inside my stomach. I scrambled around frantically for things I could say that might at least sound like interesting fears, just to keep the conversation running, but everything was blank. I had no idea what she meant by fear.

The conversation opened up a little crack in the walls of the operating system: a glitch, a bug, a malfunction. SYSTEM FAILURE. It was a complex, expert, highly sophisticated system. Normally it ran perfectly smoothly. It could cope with all manner of situations. I wasn't even supposed to know about the system; that was a crucial part of its operational success. It was supposed to be invisible to conscious thought. But suddenly it had become slightly visible. The system, you see, was designed to block out all direct experience of fear. Not just the deep fears my friend was describing, but all those daily ones that trundle along with us, little packages stored up from the past, seeping into so many daily situations. I may not have known what fear is actually like, but I was terrified by it. It was not on my list of desired experiences, and the system had developed over the years to block it out, deploying a range of strategies that clicked automatically into gear to avoid it at all costs.

In the last few years I've started deliberately inducing system failure. I've been unpicking the system, dismantling it, deconstructing it. And it turns out there was fear everywhere. A whole tide of it, mostly based around fears of intimacy, of rejection, of being abandoned, of other people's anger, of feeling too much of other people's emotions and not being able to separate from them. Those fears turned out to be so deep that they were driving, well, most of my personality and behaviour: the system. It's been a stubborn little fucker to break down. It seems to have multiple back-up options, so that just when it seems as though one part has been kicked out, another, deeper layer pops up. Of course the trick is to identify its different parts, and find ways to do something else instead of them, which of course means going into those fears and allowing them just to sit there, until they stop being so threatening and everything seems okay. Sounds simple, right? Welcome to the rest of my life's work!






So, what are you afraid of?

running

I used to hate it, that kind of longer distance running at a slower speed that so many people do now. My body seemed heavy, slow, dragging. I couldn't see how it could be enjoyable, going on and on and on at a steady pace. I didn't get it.

I was into running fast, in bursts. I played hockey and football, and that's what those sports are made of. Now fast in this direction, after the ball, into that space, chasing that player. Now slow, jogging, walking, standing. Now fast again. Ten metres, twenty metres, five metres, thirty metres: short distances. In the sports I played, this running was about noticing the outside: anticipating what will happen next, sensing people and space and how they are moving together, judging where you need to move next. And it was about changing and adapting: your team is attacking and you need to leg it, full gas up the wing to get there in time, and then switch, suddenly cutting in sideways, darting behind that defender to make yourself free; or you just lost the ball, and have to bring all your glorious running momentum to a brutal stop, let go of the shame of being beaten, and gather up your frustration into tracking the other direction to try to get it back again.
Intensity on / off / on / switch / stop.

This is where I learnt what it means to dig deep, as sport-people call it: to feel completely exhausted and empty, and yet to throw your body again forward, to drive on, to find the speed, the power from somewhere deeper. It means switching a part of your head off: the part that's trying to convince you you're too tired, you can't manage, it's too much. You have to shift it so that all the focus is purely on managing to do what you need to do: just get there. I could do this over and over again, pushing, pushing, recovering in between the bursts and then finding the energy to do another one. There was always some more left to find. I love this cycle. It's at the same time exhausting, energising, exciting and immensely satisfying.

But it was also something else, all of this pushing and bursting. It brought me into a feeling of urgency, emergency. It tapped into the mode of fighting against some deadly threat, as if survival would depend on it: hunted.

I didn't know how to fit this into running long distance. The kind of intensity I drew on in this urgent, survival mode, I couldn't keep for a longer time. So I would go on a long run that was actually just made up of fast sections alternating with slow ones, or I would do a thousand variations on sprint or speed training, intervals, running fast bursts of different lengths. If it wasn't running, it was circuit training or training in the gym. I was forever scheming up new fitness or running drills, bringing the intensity up to full, testing, pushing. I can get very excited about this kind of training. I really do enjoy it.

And still there was always this undercurrent of a hunted animal. It was as though I needed to push myself into this state, finding a point where I couldn't go on and then forcing myself over it, fighting against something. It felt a bit like war. There was a lot of pressure and anxiety inside, which I had no idea how to name, let alone deal with, and which I needed to release it somehow. It was a pretty good strategy. It helped me relax. But it didn't really change anything.

These days, after a lot of work on dealing with those feelings in other ways, I have less of the fight-or-flight thing pumping through my system, and there is less of a need to run. But it's a bit like a drug that I have to be careful with. Sometimes I find myself slipping in the wrong direction, training more again, and getting pulled back into the urgent-hunted feeling afterwards, and not even noticing until the next day. So yeah, if you see me running, maybe just make me stop for a chat.