I had something else I wanted to say to you but I’m going to talk about fear, instead, because it is everywhere around me and also inside of me. It blooms, it bursts, and I’m left with yellow all over my hands and lips. Not a pleasing pollen-yellow. It’s fetid and blunt and unbecoming.
Listening to my parents talk is when fear first germinated inside me. A parent’s sob is a nuclear bomb if you’re a kid. The smoke floats around your head for years, coats your lungs, and your little body becomes infected, and soon the yellow bursts begin. We’ve all got our spooks - fear is a big one of mine. So I did what I always do, and turned it into an unpleasantly poetic physiological metaphor: yellow bursts.
Why do I do this? Turn emotions into metaphors, insert the body into it? Maybe it’s because emotions erupt how disease does, and we return to helplessness. Maybe it’s because the body’s all I really have and violations worry me. Whatever. Fear devastates the body so utterly that I can’t help but think of it as a sickness. And I treat it the same haphazard way I deal with most sicknesses - ignore it, then when it begins to yell, grab whatever antibiotics or salves or balms or syrups I can find and stuff them into my mouth hoping one of them will work.
A thought that helped me feel a little bit less like an animal: I don’t know shit. If you’re anxious - although I hate turning that word into an identity, because it is a shroud - you might overestimate your psychic abilities. You might believe a little too much in the stories you begin telling yourself. You begin to tell your own fortune, a demented fevered priestess, your mind dizzy, and begin sinking into the oily blackness. That’s when I tell myself: Hey bestie. You don’t know shit. The universe doesn’t care about the story you’re telling. It can and will surprise you.
This is hard to believe, especially if you’re me and doom is always trying to crawl inside you. I see doom everywhere. It’s bluish-gray, like veins, like old age. The color of silk and silt and inevitability. I see it in people’s faces and in myself and it, well, it ruins me.
I feel a lot of terrible things, but they are all terrible mostly because they all take me by the hand and lead me to the most terrible thing, the worst ever thing, which is helplessness. Fear, sorrow, dread, whatever - it’s never as bad as where it takes me, which is feeling helpless. I don’t even have a metaphor for it, that’s how bad it feels. Doom is an easy way to get there. So I gotta pull it apart before it can.
There’s me, and then there’s the universe. Usually, neither of those is an ally. I’ve got a melodramatic, destructive bent. The universe, although it seems melodramatic and destructive, is actually neutral. It doesn’t care about stories. Unlike us, it understands immensity, oceans, emptiness. It understands endings and beginnings - we only understand being, and we’re bad at that too. Because the universe isn’t bound to stories like we are, it isn’t actually going to keep pouring sadness onto you. It isn’t interested in torturing you. It’s not an ally, but it isn’t an enemy either. It can still surprise you. You don’t know shit. Contrary to your impassioned, detailed fortune-telling, good things can happen, and you’re not a prisoner of fate. There is no fate. This isn’t a story.
Of course this isn’t a cure. There is no cure. This is a salve, a balm, an antibiotic when you’re feeling fevered, when you feel the yellow burst coming. When you start spinning that sick little yarn about how failure is inevitable and you’ll always be a sad, ramshackle thing. You can’t predict the future. You just can’t. The universe can and will surprise you. You aren’t a prisoner.
I know I said there isn’t a story, and I’m skeptical of narratives applied to real life in general, but I’m a writer, we’re all humans and we love stories. Stories are in our DNA and they can help us make sense of things but they can also make us see sense when there isn’t any to be found, see patterns of failure and destruction when they’re simply not there. It’s okay to tell a story, I think, as long as you know what’s up: that it’s a story, and you’re the one telling it. And, of course, that you don’t know shit. Tell yourself a story of your own resilience, your own sturdiness, your own willingness to make the best of every situation there is, and be someone who is at least always grasping for grace, even if you can’t always touch it.
🍓,
maya
I'm always coming back to this.
beautiful!