Before I began to reckon with it, fear ran, ruled, and damn-near ruined my life.
It showed up most often as anxiety. Over time, I learned that, anytime I risked leaving the tight confines of an arbitrary rule-following and imposed role-filling life, I poked my anxiety like a wasps’ nest; it swarmed, stung, and sent me back inside.
I played high school football. I was pretty good at it, but I gradually admitted to myself that I hated it. I learned that I played because its language of barely-controlled aggression and confederate masculinity was one by which my father and I could communicate. So, I played mostly for him but somewhat for us.
One morning, early in the football season of my junior year, my dad told me that a coach had told him that, if I didn’t play harder, I’d never win a scholarship—the brass ring my dad wanted me to grab, since it would validate him as a good father and me as a good son. That morning, Dad said: “It’s almost like you still want to play in the band with the other sissies.”
He was right; I did want to play in the band. I had given up clarinet and saxophone to play football. I missed the music.
At football practice that afternoon, the linemen did one-on-one drills; one of us blocked and the other tried to get free of the block. My friend, Brent Nozacki, a gentle soul, an immigrant from Japan, was my opponent for that day’s drills. I was still seething at my dad, at the sport, at my coach, and at myself. When the coach blew the whistle for my and Brent’s first drill, I unloaded on Brent with full force. I knocked him out. It was about a minute before he got off the ground and onto his feet. He wobbled over to me, slightly bowed, shook my hand, and said, “Great hit.” I dissolved in tears, right there, in front of the whole team. I felt such shame, and I feared the power of my anger and the strength of my body.
I tried to quit football, but I lacked the courage. I couldn’t disappoint the expectations of my dad and so many other people who wanted to turn me into an All-American, a real man, and somehow, at the same time, a good Christian. Every time I tried to talk about quitting, I quaked, caved-in, and recommitted myself to football. Every time, in other words, I chose a life that wasn’t mine.
More times than I care to admit, I’ve done a version of that kind of thing. Anxiety riveted me to others’ expectations and pulled me back from a more whole life. Sometimes I pushed through, but, too often, I shrunk back.
And, I grew fearful of strong emotions, not just my anger, but of joy that became exuberance and laughter or longing that stirred into desire and ecstasy or grief that groaned and wept.
I was dampened down, way down. I was afraid of life, my life—the fully-alive kind of life I knew God wanted for me but which I could not let myself experience.
For many of his working years, my dad’s dad was a meat cutter at Huntington, West Virginia’s west end A&P Grocery Store, but he preferred to be called “a butcher.” He learned that trade at the coal company store in Logan County, WV. He worked hard, took care of his family, and was an elder in the Tenth Avenue Church of God.
Though I couldn’t name it when I was a boy, I sensed melancholy beneath the surface of his ready smile and easy laughter. He was often nervous. When we sat down for meals, my grandmother, Gladys, would give us strict orders not to talk much because, as she put it, “We don’t want to stir up Hearvy’s ulcers.”
There were bright spots in his life: his long walks along the Ohio River, his delight in our Christmas celebrations, his odd affection for his balky and boxy Renault automobile, and his kneeling beside his bed to pray. But, he seemed locked-up somehow.
He died, at 67, not long after he retired from “the A&P.” Several years later, over dinner at my parents’ home, my grandmother said something that made sense of the sadness and constraint I had sensed in him.
Our son, Eliot, who was about 10 years old, said that he wanted a motorcycle when he got older. Gladys, with flashing eyes and scornful voice, said: “Well, when I met Hearvy, he owned a big Harley-Davidson motorcycle and was about to take off across the country and back on that thing. After he met me, that was all over. I told him that motorcycles was dangerous—I seen a man get ‘kilt’ on one.”
Later I saw a faded black and white photo of him leaning against his Harley. He wore a cracked black cowhide jacket, thin white cotton shirt, Levi’s, no belt. Cuffs stuffed in scuffed boots. Behind him, low slung, mirroring chrome, stood the Harley, road ready.
But, he gave it up. Her fear became his or, at least, forced a compromise. He never crossed her, and he never crossed the mountains on his bike. After all, she’d seen a man “kilt on one of them things.”
He died a little, maybe a lot, that day.
So, I got it honest, but it’s a dishonest way to live, this acquiescing to others’ expectations and this clinging to safety rather than taking the risks which fuller life requires.
For too many years, God’s voice and the voices of the people I dared not cross were like my grandmother’s: “Don’t take your life out on the open road; don’t rev it up too much; don’t feel the wind in your hair; don’t go into uncharted territory. Play it safe—or you’ll get hurt.”
Seven years ago this summer, I was at Duke for a stem-cell transplant to treat multiple myeloma, the cancer for which I’m still in difficult treatment. Both the cancer and the drugs diminish my energy and delimit my days.
While in Durham, I had searing bone pain, was overwhelmed by fatigue, and was unable to keep down food or medicine. Nighttime fears stalked me, especially the fear of dying before I really lived.
Late one night, closer to dawn than midnight, torn down by chemotherapy and brought near surrender by weariness, I went to the thin border between life and death. I was slipping away. The shadows were darker than the light was bright. I was going deeply into the valley of the shadow.
Then, I was startled alert by the loud sound of iron slamming into iron, like the shutting of a massive gate or the clanging of a prison door.
It felt like I had some choice about whether or not it was time for me to die (I won’t always), but it would have taken more energy and will than I had to turn back toward life. Then, to my surprise, anger overtook me. I got, as my West Virginia kin would put it, “good and mad.” I wanted, as they said, “to clear off a place and pitch a fit.” I’m not yet sure about the target of my anger, except that I was furious that my life would end before I lived it, before I took-out across the hills.
Suddenly, I felt Jesus nearby. He joined me in my anger. It was as if he said, “If you want to live, we can do this together. If you want to die, I’ll go with you. It’s your choice” Together, Jesus and I prayed for the strength and courage to live.
Here I am. I haven’t been cured of cancer, but I am being healed of fear by the friendship of Jesus, who calls me to fullness of life—my-his, his-my life—who only wants from me what he wants for me, and whose perfect love casts out fear—fear of death, fear of myself, and fear of unlived life.
Guy Sayles is a writer in Asheville, NC. Find him here.
