The Narrative

If I told you the story of my life, it would not be a happy one. It’s not because I didn’t have happy, joyful moments. Nor is it because I lived a bad life.

It’s just how I see it.

Sometimes I think about my school years. I try not to. But they pop up every now and then. It’s never the happy moments. It’s always the ones filled with conflict. Those times I got angry. Those times I got picked on and teased. Those times someone made me cry. Those times I made someone else cry. The lies a child tells so casually before they’ve properly developed a conscience.

I feel great shame when I remember those moments. Sometimes it hits me so hard, it might as well have happened yesterday instead of decades ago.

I don’t distinguish between the child I was and the man I have become. Usually, I don’t even acknowledge that I am a man. I still feel like the child, stumbling his way through an adult world and hoping nobody pegs me as a fraud. (When a young writer asked Neil Gaiman how to write adults, he pretty much cited that last sentence.)

I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way. Perhaps I can take some comfort in knowing that my problems are not unique.

Comfort is my strategy for coping with the fear and shame and pain of memories. It’s my strategy for avoiding painful realities of the present. Comforts such as junk food and watching television. When I was a child and I was afraid of sleeping with the lights off, I would hum cartoon theme songs to myself. I would repeat them, focus on them, until they drowned out the fear.

So much of my adult life feels designed to avoid fear. To avoid discomfort. I have done my best to shield myself from pain. And there are consequences to living your life in such a way.

I don’t deal with change very well. I have had the same job since I got out of school. It’s fortunate that my job has been so stable, but it also shows a lack of ambition on my part. I settled.

I have almost no romantic experience. Just awkward, painful tales scripted by a toxic, patriarchal culture. Stories where I was too clingy, stories where I liked someone and never told her so, stories where I came on too strong because I regretted saying nothing in the prior scenario. All focused on the binary perception of success and failure, none focused on simply being with someone I liked. It was all or nothing.

I don’t pursue things I might enjoy. I don’t write stories anymore. I don’t draw. I just stream videos, read comics. I just… consume. 

And yet I know none of this is completely accurate. It’s the story I tell myself. The story that conveniently leaves out happy moments like playgrounds and birthdays. The kid who made me cry (and vice versa) who is actually a good friend today. The people who have stayed my friends since I graduated college almost twenty years ago. Going on family vacations. Sitting at the dinner table.

These are good moments, and they deserve to be remembered. I wish they were the memories that surfaced when I think about the past. But even more than that, I wish the painful memories didn’t hurt. There’s no reason they have to hurt anymore. Their usefulness as lessons or whatever… that usefulness is long gone. 

I want to be able to forgive myself. I wouldn’t think twice about doing so if it were anybody else.

If I’m angry at myself for one thing I do today, it’s how I edit the happiness out of my narrative. The happiness is there. It has been there. But my narrative… the story I tell myself… has been inaccurate this entire time. And that inaccuracy has led me to forget joyful things. It has made me feel lost.

I need the whole story. The bad and the good.

But I’m such an unreliable narrator.

Childish Things

I have jokingly referred to Batman--my favorite comic superhero--as a rich boy who beats up the poor and mentally ill.

But lately I don't find it so funny.

It has been said that Superman is one of the hardest characters to write. There was something about him that a lot of writers didn't seem to get, and I don't think it was because they were bad writers.

I think at the core of it, Superman cannot be both a symbol for good and a corporate product to be consumed by the masses. He cannot stand for justice while preserving an unjust system.

It always bothered me that Superman--such an enormous, transcendent concept--was ultimately just a product. Just a story competing with every other story for our attention.

Merely a servant to monied interests.

It's kind of like realizing you're in the Matrix. Suddenly you can see the system, the code, the forces at play.

And suddenly I find myself understanding Alan Moore's side--the curmudgeon who insists that superheroes are for children. He's put superheroes behind him, and maybe we should too.

The Boys manages to be relevant because it understands what it means to have power and what it means not to have it. We ultimately have so little control. It's an idea that so many of us have had to come to grips with this year.

The Boys understands that there is no version of Superman that could exist in our world in his idealized state. He could only exist as a lie. As propaganda.

So many of the problems we have stem from the fact that people do not see the world as it really is. They cling to a fantasy or the false memory of the way it should be, or used to be.

I've loved superheroes for a long time, and I think I will always enjoy them. But there's a reason why so many of the audiobooks I've listened to lately have been non-fiction--a genre I managed to avoid for almost my entire life.

I am starved for something real.

Reading: The Gift of Fear, Chapter 2

I’m not sure that this is the book I need to read.

This book is all about convincing people they need to listen to and understand their fears. Whereas I think I do that too much.

Maybe I’m just listening to the wrong fears. Maybe this book can help me reset my barometer for measuring fear. My “fear-o-meter.”

Being a sheltered person with anxiety, I think I have become focused on the wrong kinds of fears. I doubt I would last very long in a dangerous situation.

If this book teaches me nothing else, maybe it should teach me that the things I am usually afraid of aren’t usually the things I should be afraid of.

Fear has a purpose. It has a place. And anxiety takes fear and puts it where it doesn’t belong.

Many examples evoked by this book involve people who suppressed their fears, ignored their intuition, and refused to see the signals. I have no doubt that I would be such a person. I do not feel equipped to navigate a dangerous situation.

But that’s not what I wanted to read about.

It is an interesting read, though. Maybe I could still learn something of value.

One thing the book points out is that we often worry more about dangers that are extremely unlikely to befall us (such as a hijacked airplane or terrorist attack) than about the things that happen every day (car accidents, domestic abuse).

Fear plays sleight of hand with us. It attracts us toward one hand and then attacks us with the other. We are attracted to the “flashy” and “exotic” fears, and we ignore the everyday and mundane ones.

But when you have anxiety, many things get flagged as “dangerous” that shouldn’t be. It affects your judgment and your habits. It makes you seek comfort and control. It makes your life a delicate balancing act, a fragile equation that gets thrown into chaos with the introduction of each new variable.

I’m afraid to talk to girls.

Why am I afraid to talk to girls?

What is the most likely worst-case scenario?

She doesn’t like me?

Underneath most of my anxiety is a fear of failure, rejection, and loss of control.

But to be afraid of those things is to be afraid of life, of reality.

Because this is reality: I am going to fail; I am going to be rejected; I am not going to be able to control everything. These are things that happen to everybody. I am not special. I have no godlike powers that I can exert over the universe to prevent these things. The only thing I can do is build a fortress and hide within it until I die.

But even if I did hide away in my Fortress of Solitude, I can’t prevent the changes from coming. Change is a force of nature. You can fight against it, but you are destined to lose. Change will overtake you. The more violently you fight against it, the more violent the change.

You can avoid the inevitable for a little while by pulling yourself away from it, but eventually something lets go, and you are hurled at each other like a rubber band. Yes, a rubber band can sting, but it would have hurt a lot less if I took the hit earlier.

It takes a lot of energy to fight against change. And for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The energy you spend is going somewhere. And eventually you simply won’t have enough to fight it, so you have no choice but to let the change happen.

Sometimes I look at myself as someone who exists within a small bubble of security. Like the shields around the Enterprise. Sometimes the outside world closes in, causing the bubble to shrink. Sometimes I feel suffocated, requiring the bubble to expand. The bigger your bubble, the more enriching your life can be, simply because you have more room.

So it’s not really about abandoning security for the sake of risk. It’s not either/or. It’s about allowing yourself to grow, allowing your bubble to expand. I don’t have to abandon all safety just to talk to a girl. I haven’t lost anything just because a job interview didn’t go well. It’s not about what I’m willing to give up; it’s about what I’m willing to allow in.

As someone with anxiety, it’s hard to allow anything new into my life. I don’t believe I can handle the uncertainty. But I can take small, incremental steps. Steps that push against the bubble without breaking it.

Maybe someday I’ll come to realize that my bubble isn’t as fragile as I fear it is.

Lost Treasure

A few years ago, I got rid of my college papers. I brought them to the dump in cardboard boxes and discarded them. I hung on to them for over 15 years. But I decided I needed to make some room for the new roommates, and that’s what I decided to get rid of.

The problem is that I’ve been looking for something. A piece of writing from that era. One that I can’t seem to find in my computer files. One that I know I had printed out at one point.

It was a story. A play I had written about college. An amusing, melodramatic parody of a Greek tragedy. But it was more than that. It was how I became friends with the people I still call friends today.

I don’t know how it began. I don’t know why I shared. I don’t even recall who I shared it with. I didn’t feel a particularly strong bond with anyone at the time. But I had been observing them. I had been interested in them. And I had written a story about them.

And it circulated. People liked it. People now knew that the socially awkward kid who kept to himself was actually interested in them. I had broken through some kind of invisible barrier. I was starting to figure out my place. At least a little.

I don’t know where I’d be right now if I hadn’t written that story. Certainly not in my house, a short walk from where one college friend used to live. Maybe I would have wound up alone and friendless. Or maybe I would have found my wife years ago (as opposed to some TBD point in the future).

Writing that story and sharing it was a decision that shaped my life. In a meta sense, it’s the story of my life.

And I can’t find it anywhere.

If there’s any consolation, it’s that the story has served its cosmic purpose. It did its work and then it went away, like we all must do. But more than that, there is a lesson—one I need to learn now more than ever:

When you create something and share it, your world changes.

So although it would make me happy to find this lost little treasure again, I need to remember why it became treasured so that I can create more of them.

Besides, a treasure is never really gone. Just buried.

When I wrote fan fiction

My ex didn’t like my fanfic character. She thought he was annoying.

Just to be clear, that’s not why we broke up. There were other reasons that had nothing to do with my writing, though I do admit I was envious of her own writing skills.

But her attitude toward my character didn’t help the insecurity that had already been sprouting. I was doubting my ability to tell his story. And that insecurity only grew as I began to write one false start after another.

And I want to make it clear that I’m not blaming her for my inability to write. That blame rests squarely on me. I think what happened was that she had insight that I didn’t. She saw something wrong that I couldn’t. And I didn’t know what to do with this information.

You see, she disliked the qualities of my character that I was most interested in. And I believe the reason she disliked my character is because I didn’t have the skill to write a story that serviced his personality.

I think it’s because I was writing a story about trauma and anxiety without realizing it was about trauma and anxiety. Yet I was also trying to shoehorn that character into a Campbellian nightmare of a hero’s journey.

Mine was a character so fearful and anxious that he became just a collection of desires that he never pursued. He didn’t have goals. He didn’t have agency. He didn’t make things happen; rather, things happened to him. It wasn’t until I finally gave him something he wanted (and actually worked toward) that I started getting positive feedback about my character.

I had a plan for him from the beginning. His journey was mapped out. But I realized too late that he didn’t have the right personality for that kind of journey. And by too late, I mean right before I started typing this blog.

It might seem strange that this character has stayed with me for so long. Maybe I should have let it go long ago. But not unlike a relationship, I think parts of a story tend to remain with you long after it ends. So here I am reflecting on a character separated from me by over 20 years, trying to understand what went wrong, trying to believe that I have more insight now than I did then.

Part of the problem with writing a story about trauma without realizing it is that the problem is always present but never addressed. In my inexperience, I believed that the problem was something else. I had created a character who needed to deal with anxiety and fear of abandonment, but within a framework of also needing to defeat the bad guys. But after defeating the bad guys, his actual everyday problems still remained. Whatever satisfaction came with defeating the bad guys was undercut by the fact that my character had not grown. I had created an unsatisfying reading experience without resolution.

And part of this problem was that neither he nor I recognized what his actual problems were. I was too inexperienced to write stories about mental health.

Could I do a better job today? I don’t doubt it. But I don’t think I have the same drive to tell his story today as I did back then. Which is a shame. He deserved better.

Analysis: The Gift of Fear, Chapter 1

I wanted to overcome fear.

That’s what I was hoping to get out of this book. But that’s not what this book is about.

This book is about how to use fear as a reliable tool.

I was looking for pointers on how to have more courage to pursue my dreams or talk to girls. This book was more concerned with protecting ourselves from violence. So naturally, when I read this some years ago, I was concerned that this wasn’t the right book for me.

But I think it does offer me a different perspective on fear, one that I often ignore. Fear isn’t just that thing that keeps me from following my dreams or talking to girls. Fear has a purpose. Fear exists to keep us alive.

But in order for fear to be useful to us, we must be able to accurately read situations and signals that might pose a threat to us. One thing that can prevent a clear reading of situations is anxiety.

Anxiety, as I see it, comes from misinterpreting the stakes of a situation. Any situation, no matter how insignificant, can feel like a life or death situation. In many of these situations, where our lives are not actually, literally on the line, fear is not the ally it is designed to be. Anxiety is fear without purpose.

The book, however, makes it clear why we need fear and how to use it. It is a tool and an ally.

Perhaps as I read this book for the second time, I can try to understand the situations where fear is required, and therefore better understand the situations where fear is not. Sort of like getting a sense of my own life by filling in all the space around it.

Each of the examples in this book is terrifying in one way or another. Feelings of helplessness. Feelings of shame because we failed to read the situation correctly. Feelings of being reduced to animal instincts and not knowing whether those instincts will save us or get us killed. But the book posits that we actually have all the skills we need. We are always receiving signals. We just have to learn how to listen to them and to trust our instincts.

I don’t know how this will help me pursue my dreams or talk to girls. But there is knowledge and insight here, and it can’t hurt to have some more knowledge and insight.

The Gift of "The Gift of Fear"

I have a friend who occasionally sends me self-help books. I try not to take it personally.

With my low self-esteem, it’s easy for me to conclude that she sends me these books because she sees there is something wrong with me. She’s trying to fix me.

But I don’t think that’s the truth. That’s just my low self-esteem.

In reality, we have known each other for a long time, and she knows that I worry about myself a lot. She knows all about the low self-esteem. She knows I struggle with anxiety and doubt. She knows I’m interested in working on myself and that I struggle to find effective ways to do so.

So she sends me self-help books. And I try not to take it personally.

One of the books she sent me was The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. It was a very good book about what it means when we feel afraid, about how fear can be an important message that we should listen to and understand, rather than something that should be fought and suppressed.

I completely misread this book.

I think it was a combination of my well-established low self-esteem along with some internalized sexism that led me to believe that this book’s target demographic was women. Most of the situations in the book were women-centric. The women were the protagonists and the men were the antagonists. So instead of reading the book to gain an understanding of my own relationship with fear, I read the book to gain an understanding of my own relationship with women.

That’s right, I identified with the “villains.”

Reading one example after another led me (and my low self-esteem) to link them to isolated incidents in my life where the Venn diagram of ME and PROBLEMATIC MALE overlapped. I read the entire book and concluded that I was actually a lot more like PROBLEMATIC MALE than I realized.

My low self-esteem weaponized a self-help book against me.

When I told my friend what I had “learned” from the book, she was visibly frustrated with me. I think from her perspective my misreading of the book was almost willful and stubborn. She was probably right.

Or maybe I’m just projecting. It takes a certain amount of stubbornness to cling to a certain way of thinking.

The thing about low self-esteem is that it actually takes a lot of work. You’re expending energy looking for reasons to dislike yourself, to put yourself down. And the worst part is, you’re lying to yourself. In reality, you’re not that bad.

So it’s in recognition of my warped perspective that I would like to reread The Gift of Fear. I want to go through it chapter by chapter and share my thoughts in this blog. And I’d like to do a better job of reading than I did before.

I wasn’t meant to identify with the problematic men in the book. I was meant to identify with the ones who were dealing with fear. Ironically, my own insecurities—my own fear—got in the way of this. So this time, I’ll do what I should have done before. I’ll identify with the women.