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.