On Fear
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 past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
— Bene Gesserit’s Litany Against Fear in Frank Herbert’s Dune
This Litany often surfaces in Herbert’s novels. Attributed to the Bene Gesserit — an ancient sisterhood that is among the most powerful factions in the Dune universe — the Litany is frequently recited by the novel’s protagonists when facing insurmountable odds. I, too, have memorized the litany, recalling its words as I scale cliffs or approach strangers. While the saying certainly evokes my love for science-fiction literature, I find myself marveling at its essential truth.
Fear is indeed a mind-killer. After all, its ancient purpose is to stop higher-order thinking getting in the way of keeping us alive.
Neuroscientists today understand the mind as complex and systematic, less a product of modularized brain regions as was once believed. Nevertheless, we can thank our amygdalae — two ancient, almond-shaped neural clusters within our brain — for their role in primal, heart-stopping, stomach-sinking, palms-sweaty, fear. Fear first evolved among our ancestors to enhance danger avoidance. A bird who fears cats will more likely live long enough to find a partner and to raise a beautiful bird family than their more ponderous and courageous siblings. Fear addresses other evolutionary pressures for social animals like wolves, chimpanzees, and humans. Wolves collaborate in packs to take down prey that is too large or nimble for an individual. Therefore, packs with loyal members are more capable of feeding their next generation. Genes, while confined to individuals, can play the game of group selection by imbuing wolves with a desire for community, and a fear of losing it. These two types of fear — of danger and of social rejection — emerged through evolution, taking advantage of the trigger-happy amygdalae and other parts of our nervous system to systematically freak us out.
Today’s world looks very different from the one responsible for our genetic hardware — I am typing this out on a keyboard, you are reading this on a screen, both of which are attached to a computer built after centuries of technological progress by a species whose finest creatives once scratched phallic symbols into cave walls. Fear, once vital to survival, does not serve humanity as it once did: Most need not worry about being eaten by a hungry cat or of being attacked by other people, and social rejection does not imply death or even isolation. Still, our fear systems keep finding new stories to crowd our minds. Here is mine:
Though I grew up in a safe and stable environment, my predecessors’ tumultuous lives shaped mine as a young boy. I grew up a son of two Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union. My parents came to the United States with little but their minds, imbued with memories developed in a culture that did not value people, especially not Jewish people. My parents’ views were also shaped by their parents, who suffered the atrocities of World War 2 and the holocaust.
My first memories were ones of fear. In my earliest memory, I was three years old; my parents were leaving our old home to move with my brother and me into a new, impressive house. I was not impressed. I did not want to leave that first place which I now cannot remember. To nudge me, my parents played as if they were going without me. It was a subtle, pragmatic joke meant to move a child amidst a tantrum — a joke I laugh at now — but the fear of change and abandonment that flooded my mind was enough to jolt me into conciseness.
This same fear of abandonment seeded my next memory. My mom had dropped me off at preschool with a promise that she would wait for me outside the classroom, close by, in case I needed her. During a break, I had the chance to peek in the hallway, where I failed to find my mom. Consumed by fear, I threw an epic tantrum, one that some of my classmates remembered and recollect today. I remember the uncomfortable smell of new-car leather as my mom drove me home from school that day — I detest that smell. I remember crying on my parents’ toilet seat, recognizing the fantastic complexity of the porous stone floor. That bathroom helped bring me into existence, and I sought refuge on that cold stone for the next fifteen years.
I find these first memories analogous to the experiences of a baby bird thrown from its mother’s nest. The falling bird must feel terror when the air slams into its face for the first time. It opens its wings on instinct and suddenly finds itself flying.
Just as air catches a falling baby bird, fear startles a human child’s mind into consciousness. I have investigated this theory anecdotally over the past few years, asking friends to recount their earliest memories. Most have offered stories of some fear-inducing traumatic experience. Usually, the source of trauma is something we can laugh about. Sometimes it isn’t.
For toddlers, lights and sounds and sensations have little structure or context; they are attributable to no-one, incapable of being remembered by anyone. At some point amid this psychedelic journey, we smash into a wall of fear and manifest our identity — this we which confronts fear, this noun that verbs, this scared self to protect. We go on protecting and reaffirming this emergent identity all our lives, often by growing our fears. There’s a tragic humor in all this: our adult fears are usually no more rational than my terror at the prospect of being abandoned by my mother in preschool.
Fear continued to define my adolescence. My mom taught me never to trust strangers for fear of being abducted. When I finally convinced my mom to let me walk home from 5th-grade class — down a couple of blocks in a very safe suburb — she would follow my friends and me around in her SUV at a distance, stalking me to protect me from abductors.
Social fears were far more pressing for me than abductors. As a child of immigrants, I could not speak English coming into elementary school. My linguistic deficiency followed me through the next several years, as I struggled to catch up and make friends with my peers. I feared speaking up when friends became bullies; I could not think of losing them — Fear is the mind-killer. I was afraid to ask for help when, after a childhood of awestruck anxiety over death, I found myself desiring death — The little-death that brings total obliteration. Perhaps my once fantasizing about jumping off high buildings contributed later to my fear of heights. I was afraid of dying and afraid to live.
As childhood gave way to puberty, I joined the ranks of boys everywhere, developing a fear of girls. At first, I was afraid of sex — or, more accurately, I feared failure in achieving sex. Once I discovered that college parties could yield all the terrible sex I wanted — and that I didn’t want any — I recognized my deeper fear around forming relationships. Fear protected me from failure. And I rationalized each fear — each choice of nonaction — as though I were running away from a hungry tiger. Until I saw another way.
In 2012, my sophomore year of college, I was celibate, neither capable of forming romantic relationships nor willing to revisit unthoughtful sex. I had a crush on Rachel, a brilliant and beautiful new student with a radiant smile and a generous soul. One Friday night, Rachel attended a Shabbat dinner I was hosting. I must have sounded quite awkward when I recounted my week to her — It couldn’t have been more exciting than going to class, smoking weed, and playing video games. Then Rachel told me about her week, about how she took the train into Boston (by herself!) to take pictures. At that moment, I felt Rachel was the bravest person I knew. The prospect of such an innocent journey terrified me. I never spent time alone outside of home, I feared interacting with strangers, and I was intimidated by photography too. For the first time, I realized that I was fearful of the very goals I desired most. I wanted to overcome those fears.
In one of my favorite poems, The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot, writes:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Like most of my favorite works, The Wasteland seems pessimistic and is filled with biblical allusions, but carries layers of optimism. Here, attachment to the past — shadow at morning striding behind you — and anticipation of the future — shadow at evening rising to meet you — are illusions that dissolve in the voluminous now, where there is nothing to fear — a handful of dust. We can spend pages unpacking this passage alone, but this is not a poetry class, and my interpretation is most definitely exactly right.
As much as I may enjoy invoking my fondness for such writing, neither Eliot nor Herbert’s observations on fear represent some elusive epiphany. Somewhere, a frat bro at a college party is draping his arm around his buddy’s shoulder, saying, “bruh! You should go talk to her. If you don’t succeed, you’re no worse off than where you are now. There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” I was that sort of frat bro at least. I also spent many times with my friend’s arm around me; knowing that truth which I proselytize, recalling Herbert’s Litany, but still unwilling to face my fear. I never did ask Rachel out.
There are few epiphanies to be found in life; change works through a person like a seedling works its way patiently through the ground and to the sky. I did not overcome fear that Friday night with Rachel, my journey to do so was only getting started.
It took me more than a year to work up the courage to address my fear of traveling alone. One summer, after saving up some money from an internship, I booked a flight to Los Angeles, rented a car, and drove up to San Francisco through Big Sur. I’ve seen many beautiful places before, thanks to my parents’ generosity in bringing me on their immaculately planned and guided trips; but in going off on my own to a place I had never been, I opened up layers of ecstasy I did not know I possessed. For the first time, I marveled at the scale of trees as wide as cars, laughed at jokes shared with strangers, and cried — several times — at the vastness of the Pacific stretching infinitely to my left, which overwhelmed my senses each time I looked head-on.
In working to overcome fears of loneliness in travel, I discovered my love for nature and for traveling alone. Love for nature pushed me to address my fear of heights through rock climbing and wilderness backpacking, the fusion of which led me to explore mountaineering. Love for solo travel pushed me to manage my fear of strangers, relying on their generosity as I hitchhiked through Siberia or looked for free housing in rural Japan. Desire for romantic relationships encouraged me to confront my fear of women by, on the one hand, exploring the many worlds of feminine sexual expression and pleasure and, on the other, building some of the most beautiful platonic friendships of my life.
These are just a few examples of many such victories over fear cascading through life, leading to more extraordinary ventures, even while fear persists. I’m always looking for an unacknowledged fear: a skipped heartbeat or a sunken gut telling me to escape a situation I might desire.
I am addressing one such fear I recently exposed: a fear of creative self-expression. I am fortunate enough to have surrounded myself with creatives of many mediums. Yet, whenever someone offered me a chance to pick up an instrument and to play, or to write a poem, I recoiled as though confronted by a poisonous snake. I always discover some good reason for my aversion: I’m tired and can’t think clearly; I don’t sound good; I don’t want to take time and space from real artists. It’s all magnificently self-deceptive, obscuring my fear of sharing my inner world and my fear of inadequacy should I attempt to do so. So here I am, tackling this fear with the one artistic skill that I have begun to hone: writing. I’ve come a long way for a child who spent most of his early schooling fearing English, but I know language alone cannot adequately express my inner world. It’s a start, one I’m grateful you took the time to witness.
