Fear

The Other Side of It

Photo by Majestic Lukas on Unsplash

One of the biggest struggles I’ve had in my life is being afraid.

I grew up my whole life being afraid:

Afraid of the dark.
Afraid of ghosts.
Afraid of disappointing other people.
Afraid of heights.
Afraid of food.
Afraid of god.

Fear was the background radiation to my universe.

It still is.

But I’m finding what’s on the other side of it, and it’s something beautiful.

Fear is control

Fear, I think, is a primal emotion that all men carry. It’s one of the sources of patriarchy and control.

It’s a reason we become competitive,
why we install hierarchies,
why we treasure status—

because we’re afraid.

All of those things are designed to make us feel more comfortable, to make us feel like we’re supposed to be something.

Because holding power over another means we can make other people afraid instead of being afraid ourselves.

We can be the “one who knocks.”

But why is that fear even there?

How does it get installed?

To me, it all starts back at the root:

We don’t feel loved.

That lack of love makes us afraid. The angst I feel every day when I get up to go to work, thinking, Will this be my last day? is one I carry.

The terror I wake with in the morning when I think about the future, wondering:

Will this be it for me?

Is this all it was meant to be?

All of it comes from fear.

The walls we build,
the political systems,
the rage, the anger, the domination—

it all stems from that core, foundational belief that we are afraid.

And instead of learning this, unpacking it, and doing the work, we push that fear, alchemizing it into blame, and expect others, especially women and the marginalized to fix us.

That’s not how it works.

The fear we hold can be shared, but it should never be assumed to be someone else’s burden. I went so far, too far, with this that I never shared my hurts. Ever.

I never wanted to be a burden to anyone. I took self-erasure to the extreme and removed myself from the narrative. I still do.

But I found something across this gulf that is starting to heal me. I want to show you what’s on the other side of that. When you step across, leap the chasm, and land on the other side of fear, what awaits you.

Love is freedom

I’ve caught glimpses of it.

Yesterday, I found it, and now my programming is trying to pull me back away.

But I refuse.

I refuse.

When you find love…

When you find a group who will cherish you, accept you as you are, let you bleed out your darkest horrors, and hug you in return—

that fear of abandonment. Of not being loved,

finally stops.

Your brain runs out of excuses.

The hundreds of stories it’s been carrying about how horrible you are evaporate in a moment when the people who accept you refuse to hear it—and call you out on your shit.

It requires stripping you bare.

It requires losing everything you thought you were.

It requires letting go of all the hatred and fear, all the status, envy, and comparison, all the stories about worth and belonging you thought you never had and letting it all melt away.

What I found is love.

The force that overcomes anything.

The love of a community that asks for nothing but you to show up as yourself.

They take on your harm.
They take on your good.
They take on your horrors.
They take on your love.
They take on your joys.
They take on your sorrows.

They “absorb it all like a sponge”, as a wise man once told me.

This is what awaits you on the other side of that chasm.

It’s to know belonging for the first time. It’s to arrive. The challenge, of course, is to stay in that moment and not lose it. The world will try to strip it from you because it can’t understand this concept.

Hell, I still can barely understand it, and I’m living it every day now.

It reaches toward something older than colonialism, older than patriarchy, older than all the other shit we’ve been carrying for thousands of years.

Is there conflict? Absolutely.

Is there struggle? Yes.

Is there hurt? Of course.

But there’s support through all of it.

None of it leaves you alone.

We all hold each other up, and we’re not even in the same room. We don’t have to be, because love has no boundaries.

All that’s required is to live in right relationship, reciprocity. Mutual care.

In fact, “love” doesn’t even describe it.

The word fails because the English word for love is too simplistic.

Agápē and philía in Greek.

Grá, gean, cion, searc, and dáimh in Irish.

It’s the unconditional, familial, full-body, head-to-toe, fully exposed, raw, open, heart-beating love where you just melt into it.

And that’s what happened to me.

I melted.

In my practice, I’ve come up with an Irish phrase that I use to challenge myself to step past my own fear:

Brí thar eagla.
(BREE HAR AH-gla)

Brí can carry strength, force, vitality, substance, and meaning.

Thar means over. Beyond.

Eagla carries fear, dread, and apprehension.

So the deepest way for me to explain it is to write the phrase out as a sentence, because English constantly fails to describe emotion.

English was forced on so many people through colonial power, and it often strips everything of meaning and replaces it with a facsimile.

Brí thar eagla means, to me:

That which powers and creates life—choose it always over fear and terror.

So, for those of us who suffer from fear, panic disorder, anxiety, or the constant terror of just living every day, no matter your situation…

I can tell you:

Find your people.

It may take years.

Decades.

It took me 39 years.

Thirty-nine years of feeling alone, even with people in my own home, because you can’t be understood by everyone.

But 39 years later, I finally found a place I can call home.

It has no walls.
It has no boundaries.
It has no city streets.

It’s a community spread across the globe who loves me, and I love them dearly in return.

That is what it means to be on the other side of fear.

I am still afraid.

I still deal with comparison and worth.

But I have people who hold it now.

And that is the difference.

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