Fear

I'm on the bus, having just barely caught it after running out of my office half in tears. I'm struggling to hold it together until I can get into my house. I've always prided myself on keeping the me that cries very separate from the me who lives in public.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

It's like a prayer or a mantra. Words I hang above my desk at work, words that I repeat to myself when I'm in the midst of a panic attack or on rare occasions  like this one, my emotions threaten to overrun in a semi-public place.

I must not fear. 

Fear is the mind-killer. 

It's not a prayer. Or a mantra. Or the beginning of a poem I love. It's the Litany Against Fear from Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune. And in moments of intense anguish, fear, anxiety, it's what pops into my head. It's not entirely unexpected. Dune is one of my all time favorite series, and the Litany itself does not ask for divine intervention or the wisdom to understand what's happening. Instead, it appeals to the intellect:

I must not fear. 

Fear is the mind-killer. 

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

The idea of it appeals to me. Fear is what shuts down your cognitive functions. Shutting those functions down brings about your annihilation  When you stand face to face with your fear you can acknowledge it and use your intellect to vanquish it.Unsurprising that it appeals to me, right? The intensely cognitive one, who's always trying to think her way out of problems, who increasingly uses facts as a weapon to undermine her anxiety, wants to think her way out of fear. Sometimes I'm so cliched it bothers me.

Anyway, as soon as I step off of the bus, I book it down the block to hurry up and get into my house. After fumbling the keys for minute, I get the door open, get into the house, and sit down at the kitchen table and fall apart.

I've just gotten off the phone with someone I love very much. During the course of the conversation they used one of those disease words. You know, those big, scary disease words. The diseases that have their own foundations, that researchers get funded millions of dollars to cure. The ones that we think could one day be fixed by gene therapy but we don't know, and by the time we figure it out, the people we love will be long dead anyway.

I couldn't hear any of the specifics I was supposed to be getting over the phone because the word just kept reverberating off the insides of my skull. Now I'm sitting at my kitchen table wishing I had heard all the details about treatment options and prognosis and all of the facts that should be helping me through this.

Once, when I was hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge in China and had to cross a waterfall without a bridge and with a sheer drop to my right, I was pretty scared. I often feel anxious when I'm working on a big project or driving through bad weather. But I have never felt terror like this before. The first line of the Litany Against Fear pops into my head and I try to breathe deeply. I try to calm down and follow my fear. I try to pull those facts about prognosis and treatment options out of the ether.

I wish I could say that it worked. I wish I could say that I calmed down, that I sat my zazen session tonight, that I realized that worrying and fear would do nothing to help out this person. I wish I could say that I looked at websites with facts about the disease and could think optimistically about the future. And at first I thought I would be able to say that. But when I stopped repeating the Litany to myself and stopped breathing deeply, when I came back, so to speak, into my own thoughts at the moment I realized I was shaking. And was about to be comprehensively ill.

My brain has spent twenty-eight years tricking me into thinking that facts, that knowledge, that rationality would save me. That these things alone would be everything that I needed. I could just hide behind a wall of facts and figures, take refuge in knowledge and rationality and use those things to confront my fears. When I confronted my fears, I'd be able to disarm them with all of these things. To a certain extent, that kind of thinking has helped me to face the small fears I've encountered in the past. But tonight my body is telling me that this fear is a little too much for my brain to handle.

The past month and a half has been, frankly, terrible. My professional life has been extremely busy. My family lost someone very dear to us. My grandmother was unwell. I got into a car accident. Now there's this life-altering disease to cope with. These are big, scary things, things for which I am ill-equipped to cope because I want to beat them back with facts. But while the atoms in a loved one's body will continue to exist past their death, losing them is still permanent and horrible. While medical treatments continue to get better and easier to access, they're not always successful and they're no where near affordable enough. My family and friends and support network are incredible, loving people, but they still live hundreds of miles away from me. For the first time, I'm unable to cope with fear armed with facts alone.

After awhile I manage to clean up and warm up. As I put on my sweatpants for a night in front of the television in an attempt to turn my brain off, something that isn't the Litany Against Fear, but still a prayer of sorts, pops into my head. It's a line from my favorite Dylan song, one I've loved for fourteen years:

The only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keepin' on. 

Permitting your fear to pass over you and through you doesn't mean that you don't address it, that you manacle it with facts and rationality and stash it away somewhere. It means feeling it in all of its horrible complexity and then, when it has passed, picking yourself back up and keep on keeping on. 

I am more scared now than I have ever been in my entire life, but I feel like maybe I'm just starting to fully understand the Litany and Dylan lyrics I've been mumbling to myself for years now.