I like fear. It is something that I seek out in people and places that are unfamiliar, in things that I’ve never done before. I greet it like an old friend, welcoming that full body squeeze, that razor-sharp paralysis, that threat of danger.
When I was fourteen, I signed myself up for a jazz band camp. A week in the woods, sequestered in music rooms, brimming with teenagers who could coax overtures out of pianos and saxophones as easily as they could shovel cereal into their mouths at the dining hall. I was pretty good at trumpet, but I was nothing compared to them.
Though I knew my way around jazz standards and big band pieces, I had no idea how to improvise. If you don’t know jazz, just know that improv is it. And try as I might, my brain doesn’t work that way. I couldn’t do it. No matter, for the final showcase I was slotted into a twelve bar solo. A chord progression over the blues. It meant that I would have to improvise in front of the entire camp and their parents. That familiar feeling crept over the grounds, through the trees, settling within me, telling me that I would fail. At night, with the covers pulled up to my chin, I imagined all the things that could go wrong. Stiff fingers. No sheet music. Coming in too late or too early or not at all. During the day I would wander the grounds, rented to the camp by a Connecticut boarding school, carrying my trumpet case, wishing I could disappear into the pine. No matter, the days rolled on. The performance, the thing that I dreaded, became the present moment. I put on a silk skirt and walked out from the wings. Fear haunted me, but it didn’t stop me.
I stood up there on the stage in front of the packed auditorium. The lights blazed and I couldn’t see anyone in the audience. I took a breath and let it all go. The music erupted from my instrument. It was brassy and loud and I made mistakes, but it didn’t matter. What transfixed me was the rush of it, how the fear melted into something new, something raw and electric. I had dangled myself over an open chasm of self doubt and had held on. I was addicted.
Without fear, days bled into one another. Time passed in a repetitive drag and comfort masked monotony. As much as I did not want to get on that stage, it is a memory that has stuck with me. The fear gave way to excitement, and the experience embedded itself in my personal history more than the nights in bed or the days spent wandering could have. What I was afraid of changed as I grew up, and as it changed, and as I confronted it, so did I.
One summer night when I was nineteen, I was alone in a club in Croatia. There were great big strobes that pulsed neon blue light over the crowd, reflecting off of disco balls and metal cages and the jewelry hooked into our bodies. I couldn’t find my friends. The music beat through the floor and shook us, it made us jump and fling ourselves around and crash into each other. There was a boy. I don’t remember what he looked like, but I remember he wanted to kiss me. Let me tell you a secret. Not so much now, but definitely then, when it came to boys, the fear was maddening. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t speak. I wanted to kiss him too, but I was afraid. It wasn’t like the jazz camp, when I put on my silk skirt and walked up onto the stage. I didn’t know how to kiss, there was no way to practice, not like blues scales. I confronted my fear that summer by staying still when I wanted to run away. I let him come to me and let myself enjoy it. I realized that there really wasn’t anything to be afraid of. I also realized that part of what made it so fun was the rush of it, the enjoyment was both defined and exponentiated by the fear.
I love fear so much because I get to meet myself all over again. I know what I am like in the morning when I am brushing my teeth. I know what I am like at night when I have dinner with my friends. I know what I am like in all the familiar moments in between. I don’t know what I am like tumbling out of an airplane into the open sky. I don’t know what I am like living on a publishing salary in the most expensive city in the world. I don’t know what I am like backpacking down the length of New Zealand. I don’t know what I am like running naked through the library. I don’t know what I am like as a mother, as an aunt, as a grandmother. I don’t know what I am like when I am alone, thousands of miles from anyone who has ever known me.
In this way, there is so much of myself that I do not know, that I have yet to discover. I am deeper and wider and wilder than I could ever imagine. I am also malleable. Throw me on stage or press me against a wall. What I have learned from embracing fear is that I am always tougher than I think I am.
