on fear

When I was five or six, my school started weekly screenings of a serialised educational programme that was meant to teach language skills through the medium of Exciting Adventure Saga. It’s a well-remembered Exciting Adventure Saga amongst my age group, and the consensus seems to be that it did its job well. It had an epic quest to save a magical land, with a dragon and a massive talking mouse and a singing swamp and a green man and an orange man and a purple woman and a big intimidating villain and lots of fun with letters and words.

It scared the everloving shit out of me.

Not in the sense that it made me jump, or gave me a couple of nightmares. It wasn’t just that I covered my eyes when the baddie came on screen. I didn’t sleep properly for years. It was the first thing that jumped into my mind when it was dark, or quiet, or when I was alone. I used to squish myself into the tiniest little space on my bed and barricade myself in with whatever happened to be in my room – teddies, magazines, empty boxes, inconveniently pointy plastic toys. (Having written that, I realise I’m still not quite over this nesting-in-everything habit. Hmmm.)

In defence of baby Jen, the villain of this particular show was an eight foot tall bird-skeleton thing who could melt people by touching them. I still think that’s a legitimately horrible thing. Admittedly, baby Jen was also scared of pastel hippos and being stared at by a live tomato with no face (my father accidentally traumatised me with sarcasm), but that passed much more quickly than the fear of melty skeleton man.

My parents had me removed from TV time when they realised that it was causing me some fairly serious problems, and I spent the rest of the series sitting in the library (or what passed for such in my fairly rough local primary school) with the kids from the friendly neighbourhood cult who weren’t allowed TV. This was rather less helpful than you might think. That terrifying bird thing was burned into my brain, and it followed me everywhere for the next three or four years. Being hauled back into the TV room for the final episode, where nothing happened to the bird thing at all until the closing credits, when it DISAPPEARED as it was walking RIGHT AT ME was also somewhat less reassuring than my teachers anticipated. Damn you, show. Damn you.

As an adult, my memory, imagination and sense of empathy have kept me from watching or reading or listening to any number of things. Horror is out. Gore is out (“oh, it’s not that gory,” people say reassuringly when trying to persuade me to watch something. But there is some gore? “Yes, but it’s really not - ” Thank you very much, I have noted your recommendation and will be over here assiduously NOT WATCHING IT). I point-blank refused to read one of the books on my university syllabus on the basis that it was fucking gross. The three-line synopsis given to me by one of my classmates was more than enough. But mostly, my fears of bird-skeleton things and coal-eating dragons and green trolls lurking under bridges followed the more common path and developed into mundane fears of what-if and other people’s reactions to things I did, or said, or was. Those mundane fears kept me static and terrified for an uncomfortably long time, and there is pretty much nothing to say about that period of my life, because nothing happened. I understood boredom. It was comfortable.

My fear of the unknown is now all but gone. I think everything is an EXCELLENT idea, especially if I’m in the company of people who can also be persuaded to think that everything is an EXCELLENT idea.

Actual email conversation between my mother and me last year:

Mum: Just back from visiting Pat and Paul! Are you in for a phone call tonight?

Me: I’m actually in Italy with an Australian I met on Tuesday. I can call you on Sunday evening.

I’m still a fraidy-cat at my core. I can find really interesting ways to be scared of something. But the voice telling me to be scared is much smaller these days. It has to compete with impulsiveness and curiosity. It has to compete with the rational voice explaining why the thing is not a scary thing at all, and also with “do it do it DO IT it’ll be funny”. The comfort I used to find in monotony is pale and disinteresting in comparison to the comfort I now find in my equally silly friends who clearly aren’t scared of the thing at all.

Sometimes the fraidy-cat still wins, and that’s OK. Some things will pass me by. But I am busy and happy, and I don’t have holes in my life that I need to fill with regret. We’re good, my fears and I, and these days they shut up when they’re told to.