A couple of weeks ago was Yom Kippur, the most serious of the Jewish holidays, a time of contemplation and repentance. We take time for reflection, acknowledgement of our shortcomings and express our hope that the coming year will be a better one.
Aside from a truly brave and uncommon self-assessment of one of the rabbi’s biggest lifelong shortcomings, the services and the sermons focused on finding new ways of coming together as a community, web-based and socially distanced activities you can participate in to maintain your connections, and how important that is in a pandemic reality. They even had members of the community read stories about how the pandemic was affecting them and how they were dealing with it. One in particular was about an incident where a woman got pulled under a wave while on a beach trip. She talked about how it made her feel embarrassed, angry and defensive, and off balance. When she finished, I found myself puzzled over the one emotion literally everyone in that situation would feel, but in this story, went unmentioned: fear. Throughout the service I watched and two sermons, not once was that word said aloud by either readers or clergy.
All of us are facing uncertainty, increased threats to our health and safety, and no end in sight to a way of life we don’t want. I have read a lot of articles that attempt to address these issues, and I have watched experts on medical and mental health talk about it. Sometimes they give advice or tips to get through to the amorphous end, but I can’t recall anyone, not one person saying they feel fear.*
Well, I will say it. I am afraid.
I am an eternal optimist, mainly because with all of my health issues, I’m not dead yet. So, optimism is kind of who I am. I’m still afraid.
We are all developing a terrible resignation to the massive retooling of our lives. I don’t want to live this way, but I am afraid of what will happen if I don’t. I am afraid to hug my family and friends. I am afraid to enjoy things that were once second nature – bookstores, movies, restaurants, even bars, which I only ever went to because I wanted to see my friends and that’s where they were. Even doing things deemed low risk by medical experts, like taking a walk, still carry a higher level of risk than they did before, and as such, induce fear.
Low levels of fear are still fear, and just because we have learned to live with it and to take informed risks based on medical expertise doesn’t mean it’s disappeared. And the problem with dancing around it by cloaking it in other names and maintaining a determinedly optimistic view is that it feeds a certain kind of stigma – that in order to maintain a brave face, and to remain “strong” feeling fear is not acceptable. Going for over six months in this vein has allowed the stigma to fester.
I think people hope that if they only avoid that word, avoid thinking about how scared they are, it will keep the floodgates of additional emotions – horror at 210,000 dead, anger at missing out on life – at bay for at least a little longer. That’s not true. Take it from me, the floodgates will burst, and the longer you wait to deal with difficult emotions, the harder it is to wade through them to a safer emotional place. (Because of my complicated health I have lived with fear on some level or another for most of my life. For a long time, I pounded it into submission in order to live. That tactic didn’t turn out well.)
Fear doesn’t change what is. It feeds denial, anxiety, stress, insomnia, and many other psychological conditions that have seen a massive increase since the pandemic began. It’s a burden. It’s also an instinct and deserves to be acknowledged and taken into account before we can move forward.
And we will move forward, however we can as families, colleagues, and individuals. As we do, I would argue that admitting our fear, and thereby showing vulnerability, and still living the life that you can under the circumstances, is the definition of courage. We will need courage to get through the pandemic. As said by both FDR and Nelson Mandela, courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to face it and move forward in spite of it, even though it is standing in your way.
So please, take a moment to admit, even if just to yourself, that you are scared. If not to a loved one, say it in your head or into your mirror or a pillow. And then move forward, hopefully with a lighter emotional burden weighing you down.
* The President has now admonished us not to be afraid, which has caused a little ripple of discussion, but it is not nearly enough.