HAPPY TUESDAY, F-WORDERS!
This week, on THE F WORD: our F changes from Failure to FEAR. Get ready for open ended questions! Contemplations! And lots and lots of listed nouns!
There’s an unassuming magazine that was delivered to my doorstep this weekend.
Unassuming, because the magazine is only 47 pages including the cover (page numbers including the cover is standard formatting for a magazine, but adorable none the less). Each issue has a different categorical thread that weaves the pieces together and all contributions are from writers based in Oregon.
This issue’s central focus: Fear.
The Oregon Humanities, Spring 2024 Issue.
I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the Oregon Writing Scene™, but the beauty of working at a brewery has led me to all sorts of people, all sorts of stories. A customer who comes into my work is an editor at the magazine, and I immediately joined their mailing list.
Between the ink-sticky pages of this season’s issue:
-a writer whose friend witnessed a murder at Sanger Lake and talked the man down from killing her, too.
-A rurally-based journalist is a victim of an anonymous assault because of his writings about fear and anger: a bullet through his window one week, a rock through the window the next. (“We have killed our hearts because we found pain there, the pain of hard choices.”)
-A woman who was hiking alone in the Sisters wilderness and her dog was attacked by a cougar. (“The shriek lives in me still.”)
These articles and more: all connected by the thread of fear.
Fear branches out like roots, like a nervous system: it grows into other nerve endings that throb and sting with the realities of life.
Panic. Pain. Dread. Sorrow. Loss.
But it all comes back to fear. We fear Failure, because Failure is the fulfillment of our worst fears coming to pass. Failure is our worst fears being realized.
Inadequacy. Insecurity. Incapableness.
FEAR loves holding hands with VULNERABILITY.
Fear is ever-present in our lives. From direct and tangible fear (an intruder in your home, a man waiting for you in the parking lot), to elusive and insidious fear (the consequences of a resume gap, the rate of childhood cancer is increasing and oh-god-what-does-that-mean-for-my-kids).
We fear because we are human, but many of our fears extend beyond our basic, encoded Survival Instinct and bleed into the realm of Powerlessness.
On the daily, whether you listen to the news or not, we are faced with dying democracy, a dying natural world. We literally see women’s bodily autonomy being stripped away day by day. There’s an impending economic collapse, a braiding of addiction and houselessness, corruption that’s embedded deep into political systems…
Very real, very tangible things that we have absolutely no control over on a day-to-day basis.
Yes, we vote. We mobilize. That will never stop being important; critical, even. But disillusionment occurs when we are not represented, and when we become cogs in the wheel of personal gain. We must still vote, because our own fear—however legitimate, is politicized and weaponized against us.
War, terror, illness, corruption.
How do we keep our lives from being ruled by fear?
And, to add to that:
How do we keep our lives from being ruled by fear…while still being able to recognize—and not ignore—that we are constantly under threat?
How do you maintain authenticity in the face of fear?
Much like I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the Oregon Writing Scene™, I don’t claim to have any sort of answer to this question.
There’s something that happens to you the more years that you live.
Unadulterated (pun intended) experience means that pain and loss, disappointment and failure, are no longer filtered through the lens of idealism.
Youthful idealism is exhausting, and unsustainable.
But does that mean that idealism and pure, delicate joy of the sweetness of life is unsustainable, too?
From my own personal experience, as someone who has suffered loss and betrayal, I suppose I sometimes figure…what is there left to fear when you’ve been betrayed?
When we experience fear, and when those fears are realized, we can become bitter, or we can become deeper.
Bitterness is a withering. Deepening is a growing.
When you’ve suffered one of the most painful things you can, and you’ve not only survived, you’ve become more of yourself than you’ve ever been, what then? What do you do with all the pain, loss, fear, life throws at you?
Deepening means that you learn that you are made of tough stuff; tougher than you thought, even.
And pain does not beget pain, nor does it prevent it. There is not some giant cosmic scoreboard saying that because you’ve suffered THIS MUCH pain, you’ll be saved from THAT MUCH. Sometimes: we’re hit hard. And other times, we’re hit even harder.
But I suppose in this conversation about FEAR, we also need to discuss how to shuffle that fear into the deck of our lives.
How do we coexist?
That’s a longer newsletter.
And with that, a true cliffhanger.
Until next week, F-WORDERS.
Love, light, and unanswered questions,
Steph xx