Fear and Self-Loathing

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity for action despite our fears.”
-- Senator John McCain

Through the expansive windows of my uncle’s living room, I stared out at my first Florida sunset in two years. Streaks of pink and orange lined a handful of spotty black clouds. As the clouds eventually won over the day, the sun’s last gasp turned the world blood-red. Wispy winds rolled over the pond, making the world shiver in its reflection. The fronds on the palm trees swayed tauntingly, as if beckoning for the monster’s arrival. I turned to my uncle:

“It feels like God is coming,” I told him.

Fifteen years ago, the thought of being in Florida while a category four hurricane churned up the Atlantic would have paralyzed me. Yet I stared at the evening sky as the initial gusts of Hurricane Frances rolled over the house like dragon’s breath, and I felt a deep satisfaction being there. Though the idea of taking a break to go live in Florida for six months to a year seemed like a vacation to most of my friends, for me the act was as reckless as I get. And it required me to overcome a great deal of fear in order to do it.

It’s amazing how subversive fear can be, how sneaky. When I was suffering at a miserable job watching my blood pressure climb and my self-worth plummet, I didn’t blame fear for my idleness. I blamed good sense (jobs are hard to come by these days, especially with health insurance). Or I blamed greed (I make really good money).

But fear? Absolutely not.

I never quite understood self-destructive behavior until I discovered it in myself. It just didn’t make much sense to me. Why would a person consistently do themselves harm? Most of the time such behavior associates with alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse. I saw my fair share working on a riverboat casino. But I was a young man who rarely drank (never got drunk), didn’t smoke, and whose closest experience with drugs was seeing Half-Baked in the theater. Surely I had avoided the grasp of self-destructive behavior.

Despite a reasonably privileged and successful life, two fears kept me on a merry-go-round of doubt and self-loathing: fear of failure and fear of not getting a fair shot. It’s an interesting dichotomy being confident in your talent, and yet expecting to fail. For more years than I can remember I’ve known I was going into a tough racket. Writing, acting, directing – nobody has ever given me a satisfactory breakdown of just how much talent plays a factor; most of it seems to be luck. For somebody who doesn’t believe in fate, destiny, or the like, relying on luck does not a confident artist make.

It wasn’t until a year ago that I realized just how much my senior year of high school affected me. Watching my football career so bizarrely and so immediately come to an end showed me just how fast our greatest dreams can be quashed. Aware of the ever present ticking time-bomb of IGA Nephropathy running through my life, I know that despite taking immaculate care of myself, any other pursuit can end in a heartbeat if my kidneys decide to rebel against their host. So, what does one do with that information?

For a while, I let it own me. My self-destructive behavior was a middle finger to a godless universe. If life could screw me like it did with my football career, I wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction of taking away something I cared about. I wasn’t going to let the other shoe drop, damn it. I was going to be holding it myself... by one shoelace... over a cliff. For the last two years, I had nothing that could be taken away from me. I didn’t have a career. I didn’t have a love. I barely had a home. What could life possibly take away from me?

While that seems slightly logical in that context, it also means my life had little value. Sure nothing could be taken away, but that meant I didn’t have anything to begin with. As my wise and caring friend, Jasmyne, would say:

“That’s asinine.”

To this date, I have found no better to pull myself out of the doldrums of depression than to have a beautiful girl call me a coward. If there’s a ten-point scale of personal opinion, I can count on two hands the number of people I would rate at a 10. When a 10 speaks they get my utmost attention and consideration. Jasmyne is a 10. She has been for most of the time I have known her. Even when I’ve hated her (she actually turned my ears red with anger – a first for anyone in my life), it didn’t diminish what she had to say. Besides, she’s cute. So she can get away with just about anything.

I’m not always certain Jasmyne gets me, but because of how she works she doesn’t necessarily have to. She asks questions -- good ones -- that take me to a part of my brain that isn’t dizzy with philosophies and dramatics. She brings me back to Earth, in a gentle, and occasionally infuriating way. As I griped about my unhappiness, she plainly asked why I didn’t do anything to change it.

I sputtered and stammered, throwing out dozens of excuses I felt completely justified my self-destructive behavior. She cast aside each one with equally logical deconstructions, a mild expression of pity on her face. Here I was trying to impress the first girl in a long time to completely fascinate me, and not for one moment did I get a better response than “Eh.”

It wasn’t that I couldn’t impress her. I just wasn’t. She saw my increasing unhappiness and did not understand why I didn’t search for something more fulfilling.

“What are you afraid of?” she asked.

It turns out, quite a bit.

However, as I write this from my uncle’s living room, I can say that my fears no longer control me, as they did while I was at home. They are still there. I still have my doubts, but my doubts and uncertainty will not keep me from making an effort.

At nine o’clock this morning I sent out my graduate school applications, a defining moment on my current track. Am I afraid? Kind of. I’m afraid I may have forgotten something, even though I checked each envelope a hundred times over. But am I afraid that I might fail? Not really. The possibility exists; I sent one application to the most prestigious creative writing school in the country. I'm bound to fail there. However, my time in Florida has confirmed that life does not have to be as unhappy as it was at the Isle of Capri Casino.

Life is what you make it, and it's time to get my hands dirty.