When it comes to fighting fear, I like to think of myself as Churchillian, but if I’m being honest I’d have to say I’m more like the boxer Joe Lewis. Since I realized five or six years ago just how much fear I have been living in and how much damage it had done to myself and other people, I decided to fight it with body and soul and since then I have been throwing everything – the kitchen sink, too – right at it, trying club it senseless even when I couldn’t quite understand it. I’ve been to therapists, analysts, MD’s, naturopaths, spiritual counselors, Tarot Card readers, shamans, meditated, gone on hikes, retreats, Zen gatherings, read manuals and self-help books, adopted postures, given fear names, tried breathing exercises, visualizations, mantras and incense, candles and herbs, studied Thomas Merton, Aquinas, the Kabbalah, the Bible, Hannah Arendt and countless philosophers and spiritual texts.
Maria has witnessed this colossal struggle between a willful man and the terror that lived inside of him like some awful demon. She agrees that I am willful if nothing else. I’m at a new point with fear and panic, feeling less of it than I ever have, even as I face some serious challenges in life. I think I have backed fear into a corner – literally. I used to stay awake all night, now I go to sleep. I used to wake up in terror at 1 a.m., not I wake up in terror at 4 a.m., and even then, only sometimes. When I wake up, I am another person, terrified, trapped, overwhelmed, I am not myself. But I realized this week that I have beaten fear up pretty good, thrown it off balance, backed it into a corner.
I call it the island of terror, the time between 4 or 5 a.m. and daylight. This is where my fear has retreated, this is when it appears, this is when it paralyzes me. But the very good news is that this is the smallest space fear has ever occupied in my life. It is not making my decisions any more, or choosing my relationships. I am no longer surrounded by people who do not love me, but by people who do. I am no longer walled off from the world, but am opening up to it.
It has not been pretty and not been easy, but I think I am clubbing my fear pretty thoroughly. I chip away one piece at a time. It is not a short exercise, but a long march. It takes patience and discipline, two traits I have been lacking in my life. I have it pinned down now, stuck in a small corner of my life, my night. I will keep on swinging, chipping away, encircling it, throwing every thing I have at it. In a few more rounds I might just chase it right out of the ring. I’ve got it in a corner.