What is fear?
Before we start talking about feeling it and doing it anyway, it helps to consider what "it" really is
Today I was planning to write about fear. A resolution-y kind of take on what scares us and what drives us on. I still am, I guess, but in the last few days I’ve been forced to re-examine my perspective on it.
It started because I’ve been thinking about fear a lot lately. Partly, in the most basic way, because I’m writing a novel* that uses some horror tropes and I wanted to immerse myself in them, so I’ve been watching back-to-back horror films – Get Out, Hereditary, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, The Substance, Babadook, The Witch, The Lighthouse, Immaculate, Us, you get the picture. And the thing that really struck me was… I wasn’t scared. Certainly not in the bone deep way the word fear implies for me.
Oh, I jumped, often. I felt disquiet, sure. Occasionally I even wanted to retch as Demi Moore was reduced to the gelatinous inside-out blob Monstro Elisa-Sue (but that wasn’t fear that was revulsion). But my days of being so scared I couldn’t look – of hiding behind the sofa until the cybermen had gone (very Brit Gen X Dr Who reference, sorry) – are long gone.
For me, as I’ve aged, fear has been a motivator… Fear that I can’t. Fear that I shouldn’t. Fear that I’ll fail. All of the above, but also fear of the risk not taken, the opportunity missed. Fear, ultimately, of obsolescence.
And partly, because I’ve come to the conclusion that our notions of fear shift as we age and I’m interested in why that might be. The visceral fear I used to feel on e.g. waking at 3am in an empty house convinced I heard someone downstairs/ in the attic/ under the bed, has left the building. Fear of the physical threat has been replaced by something less…. tangible. Fear of an absence rather than a presence, maybe? (I’m thinking out loud here.) An absence within ourselves. A loss.