Week: Paralyzed by fear

Do you ever find yourself striving to attain a goal, and then, just as you are inches from its accomplishment, you enter into some sort of strange paralysis that doesn’t allow you to take the final steps, to complete the most meaningless of tasks, to just fucking finish because you are terrified of what happens next?

Maybe it is just me.

I think back to the final year of my doctoral studies, my final, extended remix, in which I only had to write one damn chapter, and days and weeks would pass, and job interviews would happen, and other publications get submitted, but not the damn dissertation. It was a period of suspended existence in which it seemed like an ideal thing to fall in love with a person who had zero job-mobility, and no capacity for selfless love, and then pine for him from across the country once you got the job and actually finished. Right. I’m always running. Clavo saca clavo and all that, even if the nail that gets nailed away is an existential one in the coffin of a moribund relationship.

I’m frightened of change. And of calling a losing hand. There. I admitted it. I’d rather cling to a sinking ship, race through a burning building trying to salvage throw pillows and caviar, than to feel like I have abandoned someone in need.

Today, my beautiful, anxious, brilliant, terrifying, empathic baby girl started college. She signed up for 8 am classes Monday-Friday. She’s so eager to begin her life, especially after these last few years, of bifurcating paths, and dead ends that end in a crash and burn, and mostly, I also must admit it, success. I don’t see it, can’t see it, really, but it is there too. Years of struggle and hard work have paid off. Is it some sort of vindication of a cosmic meritocracy? I’d like to say I don’t believe in that at all… but it is hard to renounce your privilege, even when you know it is there. It is hard for my ego to let go of the idea that I somehow deserve this good fortune because I have been an ethical, diligent planner and worker. I don’t deserve it any more than I deserve the bad fortune and pain that I have experienced over the years. I’m trying to remember that I am not in control of much. Soon, not anything. But releasing the illusion of control can be freeing… if I could just… loosen… this… grip…

Phew.

I’ve always been a pessimistic pragmatist. When I was a small child, I wanted to die because the universe was ever-expanding, and if that was true, what happened beyond the edges? The idea of some negative anti-space past the bounded, yet expansive, universe and my certainty that there was, in fact, no benevolent god to imbue our lives with meaning, was too terrifying for my 5-year-old self to process.

If there is nothing, I would wail, then why exist? What purpose could there possibly be? At some point, perhaps fueled by hormonal shifts, and poetry-writing teenage angst, it occurred to me that the ONLY meaning in life is the meaning we, ourselves, give it, and that the purpose that I chose was love. In all its permutations. My 15-year-old self decided that the sweet torture of loving, and the moral rectitude of always working from a place of love, always towards love were enough to convince me to keep my nose to the grindstone, to keep shouldering on, because love was not the prize, it was the journey itself, and with that, I chased away my suicidal impulses which were never really about death, but rather of some desire to experience the terrifying non-existence that predates life, not the reverse. In my family, they would tease me mercilessly, and when I indignantly defended myself, they would say I was a pessimist. Any attempt to refute this family mandate was futile, because in the “no, I’m not!” the response would always be: “see? You’re so negative.” But even then, strong-willed Ilana, unruly, angry, wall-smashing, glass-shattering, pleasure-denying, punishment-seeking 10-year-old me was entirely confident in her own interpretation of reality, and that the unwavering fact was that she was NOT a pessimist, but rather a REALIST, and I hold that belief to this day. I read somewhere recently that people with depressive tendencies tend to more accurately assess reality because they don’t overestimate their control over a particular outcome through some filter of hopefulness. I felt vindicated.

If only for a moment.

Sometimes, I think, it is the dread of knowing the unknown is unfolding and we are quietly sliding down, down, downward spiraling out of control… and maybe our skin-in-the-game will offer enough friction to slow us down, to let us glutinously creep back up, scrambling for the peak, over which we have already spectacularly sailed… sometimes I know I’m full of shit. And conversely, what hubris is this inertia, to think that what we know is somehow inherently better than what we don’t, or that we can accurately predict ANY multi-factorial outcomes. But, seriously, I know what needs to happen and I STILL can’t make myself do it. I know that if I just quietly place one foot before the other, I can breathe, it will pass. But there is a terror when confronted with the surgical excision of our diseased flesh, even when we know that the most painful letting go of a cancer can never be a worse decision than avoiding the temporary sting of the scalpel.

All that to say, I know I have made the right decision by choosing a different path. We have made the right decision, my girl and I. And I think, my word, she has grown, she can go toe to toe with me and use my arguments against me, she can see through my pettiness and call it out, with a sharpness usually only doled out onto me by myself, she can cut through my excuses for the behavior of others, and she can be so very very compassionate to me (if not to herself. Learned behaviors, I know.)

I think back two and a half years ago, when confronted with the decision to pull her from public (actually, charter) school, to attempt to save her from a deep, dark depression. I didn’t know for sure that I was making the right decision, and I know that there are things I could have handled differently over the last years, choices or sacrifices that I could have made, perhaps should have made, questions that I should have been brave enough to ask, to face answers that I already intuited but was too afraid to have enunciated, and therefore become real. I was cautiously hopeful when I should have relied on my pessimistic realism, but I was just, so damn tired. And I needed to believe that I wasn’t just throwing pennies into an abyss.

Every time that someone would ask her: what school do you go to? What grade are you in? I would inwardly wince, not so much because I was ashamed of the explanation that I would have to give, but because I knew how much weight it put on her little shoulders, how her self-concept was tied up in the notion that she was somehow failing me, somehow failing to measure up to the children of my colleagues, by failing to conform to a system founded on structural inequities: structural racism, sexism, and obedience to authority. Now I’m no anarchist, and I have taught at public high schools and universities, and my financial security, if not my socio-identity, are precariously balanced atop a pyramid scheme that favors the few and is stabilized on the low-paid labor of many. Yet, I do believe in the transformative power of education. But not at the cost of my child’s life, and I did truly believe that at the time, it was a life or death decision. I stand by that.

I do.

Today she started college, and it would be easy to smile and nod and pretend that it was always smooth sailing. It wasn’t. There were nights of howling, shrieking, soul-rending pain, of mutual incomprehension, of my inability to properly parent, and of her inability to take mercy on me, or to imagine an emotional universe beyond her own, one that included a mama who is still just trying to figure it out, still just trying to be a coherent grown up, still just trying to build a house out of love, and still falling down in the mud.  There were weeks in which getting out of bed was, if not optional, a rare occurrence. Up until the final week of test taking, and lost passports, and an infinite number of pop-up disasters in a maddening obstacle course, she was unsure of her own ability to complete the task set out before her. I never doubted her ability, but I did waver in my belief in her resolve. So I offered her my resolve, to fill in the cracks, and today she offers me her energy, so I can finish this cycle strong, cross my t’s and dot my i’s, and send it all off to press.

I can.

We are soon to be alone again, in our little house in the desert. Tomorrow there will be massive protests in the city, and I feel compelled to not only bear witness, but to use my own body, my own privilege as a shield for others. I can’t say I feel entirely hopeful, I can’t say I can accurately predict the unfolding of the next few years, or even the next few months or weeks or days, but I can say that I am afraid, yet unashamed to own my fear and keep moving through it.