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?
