I’ve entered a different and powerful phase of my lifelong experience working to understand and control and shed fear, and it has been unusually difficult for me to write about it, as it is intense and disturbing and confusing sometimes. I am writing about it, as always, in the hope that it might be useful to others working to deal with fear and also because it is central to my creativity and my identity as a writer and a photographer. And because it helps me to understand it. Fear has shaped every element of my life and work, for better or worse.

A woman e-mailed  me recently and told me she was living a loveless and  meaningless life doing work she hated for people she disliked in a place she hated. She was bored and unfulfilled, she said, but she was almost never afraid. Why, she wondered, wasn’t she, why was I? I don’t know her, but she is almost precisely what I most fear and I could only imagine that she was not afraid because she took no risks and never changed. I have a meaningful and creative life and I have always known the gift of fear, it has moved me forward and forced me to awaken, shaped my best writing, poems, blogs and photographs. I have needed and used fear, much as it has damaged, even crippled me.

I was badly frightened as a child by a number of different things and that shaped my life and left me a legacy of fear, even terror. In the nights I would lay awake in fear, paralyzed and unable to move. I responded to it by hiding the fear wherever I could – in money, other people, quitting jobs, avoiding intimacy, lots of animals, giving away things to people, using people to soothe my ferocious anxieties. I have been trying to deal with this fear, which manifested itself in so many unhealthy and destructive ways, all of my life. In analysis. Therapy. With pills and medications, flights and retreats, books and photographs, and many material things, and through a long string of counselors, gurus, helpers. It is powerful, ferocious, a Sandy inside of me.

A few years ago, I stopped therapy and medications and began a different course and it has been a difficult but productive path.

It has taken me decades of continuous work and examination to begin to see the patterns of my life, and only recently in meditation have I come to see and confront the very damaged and yet curiously determined nature of my mind. The bad news was that my whole  neural system was wrapped around terror, the good news is that I have always wanted to change that, every day of my life, for as long as I can remember. If I am damaged, I am also strong and determined to find love and bring it into my life. I work on fear every night, every day. It is, to me, like chipping away at barnicles  under water, one piece at a time, not a process of revelation but of many small steps.

Now, there is no place for me to hide.

No  more money to smother my anxieties, no more people eager to take on my life and problems, no more jobs to find, places to run, people to soothe me. Maria and I are as close as people can be, but I will not use her in that way and she will not be used in that way any longer in her life. My fear is naked, stripped, nose-to-nose with me, especially in the night, the old meeting ground. I can see it clearly now, it is hanging on for dear life, I am letting go of so many offshoots of it – anger, complaint, struggle, self-pity, argument and it is naked, as am I. It is wrenching and sometimes profoundly discouraging. I wonder every day if I am strong enough to deal with it at a point in life when most people are letting go of life’s struggles and turning to their pensions and IRA’s. It seems I am just beginning my life.

When I got divorced and broke down five years ago, I told a therapist that I would not spend the rest of my life loveless and afraid.

I have found love and I am wrapped around my fear, seeing it more distinctly than ever in meditation and with the help of a teacher, not a soother. When I told her a few days ago that I felt as if I were falling off a cliff, failing in my life and work, she told me I was full of crap and suggested I drop the old stories of my life and move on. I hear it. Whenever  I called my doctor last week, a naturopath who has been my much loved doctor for several years and told him I hadn’t slept for several days and felt as if I were falling apart, he asked me one question: did you take a beautiful picture today?

I said I did, and he said you are healthy.

So I have decided to write about fear again, and share this critical part of the process as I have been doing for some time. Because every single day, every where I go, every time I look at my e-mail, I am at a crossroads, terrified to unleash this thing, exhilarated at the opportunity. Leap of faith, say the counselors. Close your eyes and jump. I don’t seek a life without fear any more than I want a perfect life. Neither is meaningful or rational to me.  I am proud of who I am these days, and I can’t and won’t disown myself. You can change, but you cannot change into a different human being. A farmer’s wife came up to me at a recent book reading and she said she had been following my work for years and going to my readings when she could, and she said “you have changed, especially since you met this little lady, haven’t you?”

I hope so, I said, I hope so.

Fear is as much a part of me as walking, I cannot make it disappear.  But I mean to control it, and not let it control me.