I think about fear a lot. Probably
because I feel afraid - a lot. Is my eldest daughter safe riding the subway in New York City? Will my younger daughter be hit by a drunken moron as she drives the curvy mountain road between Santa Clara Valley and Santa Cruz where she's finishing her last quarter of college? Will I lose my job in middle age and become a hunk of meat on the job market, competing with women fifteen years younger and men of any age? Will I save enough for retirement? Will I ever retire? Is retirement an archaic concept of the fifties, no longer offered to the middle class, but only to those who have fluffy golden parachutes?These are just the fears I'm brave enough to put into words. They're the surface fears, the ones I'm willing to admit. You have some of the same, and we all have more. There are the shadowy terrors that wake us at night, and the tiny phobias ... spiders and food that might carry invisible salmonella.
I wanted to blog about fear because it stalks us in quiet ways. How else do you explain co-workers who don't want to forward an email because it might give you the same information they have, and if information is power, they are chipping away at their own power and giving more to you. Those of us that have information jobs hoard our secrets, emails and files and knowledge gleaned from meetings that others weren't invited to attend. We dole out our juicy bits of knowledge to make friends, build networks, to gain supporters. Bad behavior results from all the hoarding of knowledge - gossip and jockeying for position, taking credit for others' work and bloody back stabbings.
The past few weeks, fear ratcheted up for all of us. Foreclosures spiral out of control, financial institutions that seemed like granite, crumble like sand, the stock market takes a dizzying ride as people bark out their fear: sell, buy, hoard your money, rescue your retirement funds, but it's too late.
It's an eerie feeling to drive around town, walk into grocery stores, watch the flow of human life, buying food, running errands, shopping for goodies we might not really need, if things get 'worse'. We wonder what 'worse' is. Bread lines? Unemployment? Homelessness?
I wanted to blog about fear because my fiction depicts people whose fears have overcome them, fears that swell to monumental proportion, take over their thoughts and ultimately their sanity and drive them to commit acts that transform fear into reality.
Now I can't seem to write about my frightened characters because real fear is suddenly visible and tangible and out of control. It's in the erratic red line showing the stock market shifts for the day and it's in the crowds yelling ugly words at Republican rallies. (Or maybe I can't write about them because I'm afraid my novel will be less than perfect, a pesky little fear in the grand scheme of fears.)
My current reaction to the financial fear gripping all our throats, is to do nothing. After all, what can I do? If I re-jigger my 401k, I'm told, I'll lock in my losses. If I talk of nothing else, stocks and banks and sub prime mortgages and the G7 leaders unsure what to do and my company's future and layoffs, I'll become one of my characters, letting fears take over my thoughts, driven to erratic action. Life imitating art?
So I'll just keep going to work, urging the people that report to me to set goals for the new fiscal year - we'll all remain employed this fiscal year, right? I'll keep eating out and reading books, and writing. I'll keep hoping that what I'm feeling is only apprehension over the anticipation of danger.
Footnote: I'm not alone - Americans are stressed out and afraid. Maybe it will make us calmer with each other.
~Cathryn Grant
