Fear
Fighting against the natural inclination towards fear can be addicting.I used it to leave home to move to Pittsburgh for college, again when I moved to New York. I tap in when I travel, when I initiate hard conversations, and when I ask for help.
Ignoring fear prevailed during my time as a field engineer on the Manhattan Bridge. I used it when I climbed via Cable to the top of the bridge. When I climbed via ladder inside the tower to the water surface ladder. I used it standing in the closed lane next to live traffic, performing my engineering duties next to 60 mph dumpster trucks. I used it in manlifts, controlling machinery I never thought I’d know how to operate, occasionally bumping into things, bouncing in the articulated basket, swaying with the bridge and with the machine. I used it when I had to tell tenured Ironworkers, Laborers, and Carpenters how to do their job… as a 23 year old blonde girl. I had never had conversations with this genre of people before and suddenly they have to listen to what I say. I used it when I had to climb below the train tracks, to a grated catwalk below the deck of the bridge. I used it every 5 minutes, when 30 subway cars trampled 6 feet above my head, but when I looked down, I could see 150 feet of open air and the East River. I used it when I was alone, on night shift, and the rats crawled around our trailers. I used it every morning, crossing the homeless encampment in Chinatown to physically climb onto the bridge and walk up to my desk.
On occasion, I confuddle my fear and intuition. When I push through one, I’m also violating the second. That happened a lot when I was in construction. I walked onto the job filled with wonder and the truth I discovered has left me jaded and tired. I wanted to learn how to build, but all I learned was that anyone successfully working with their brains is capitalizing on professional bullshitting. I still want to be involved in building, but I don’t want to play corporate games. I could build anything — worlds in my stories, forts in my room, relationships, confidence in clients as a therapist, intelligence in young children. I want my path to be more than a cog in the machine, I want outputs. I live in a hustle version of reality, a neverending treadmill, but I hope I can figure out how to step off and maybe enjoy a coastal jog.
I just finished reading Parable of the Sower by Olivia Butler and I’m amazed at her ability to create a reality that mirrors the current one but with chilling differences. The book begins in 2024, though it was written 1993, and it’s set in a subtly post-apocalyptic California. Google tells me it is speculative fiction and Butler speculated about a year I happened to check it out from the library. The social inequity and environmental injustice she writes about already exist in parts of the world. Her voice is striking and the main character, Lauren Olimena, is written with a strength of purpose. She seems to denounce fear, choosing to live for a possibility of opportunity instead of letting the horrors suffocate her. She knows how to fight back, even though causing pain to others causes pain to her — due to a pharmaceutical, fictional disease that allows her to physically feel others’ wounds. An exemplary representation of empathy, I will push through the fear as long as I don’t lose myself in the shove.
But I always learn something in the place right after fear. I create an alternate perspective for myself. It doesn’t feel any different but I think differently. ““All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you…God is change.” — Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
