When I was five years old, we lived in a post-war suburban shoebox outside Lexington. I had my own bedroom, prior to the birth of my brother Dan, and I didn't much care for that; you see, a witch lived in my closet.
I had a nightmare in which I hopped out of bed to go to the bathroom and had to pass the closet door. It opened, and from the darkness within emerged a gnarly old witch with glowing eyes aimed right at me. She hobbled straight at me, and my body went into slow motion - I could not flee. Cackle. Cackle. I woke up in a sweat.
And so, for several months, I was terrified of that closet. I bolted into and out of bed. You can imagine what my parents thought.
Flash-forward seven years. I'm now 12, and one night my mom pokes her head in the door to say goodnight, and in a trembly voice I ask her about atomic bombs. I know what they are, I know they're real, we have discussed them in social studies at school. The Soviet Union has lots of them - is something going to happen?
Oh honey, my mom sadly smiles, those are problems for grown-ups. You shouldn't worry about them.
The church shoveled some fear into me along the way. As a grade schooler, it was the literal fires of Hell; as a pre-teen, it was the Rapture and the Beast and 666. I got over believing in God, but took much longer to stop believing in the Beast.
Almost half a century has passed, yet I can still call up those old dreads with a finger snap.
What frightens me today?
My firstborn child was hit by an SUV. He almost died; he almost lost his leg. They had to scoop his brains back into his skull. And I have loved someone who DID lose their firstborn, almost a decade ago, and still suffers from that loss every single day.
I fear for the safety of my children.
I have a mind that's wired differently. We say ADD, but I don't think of myself as "disordered"; I think of myself as hypercreative, able to indulge myself in words and melodies that come from within me. I feel lucky.
But all of that comes at a price: my ADD mind also vanishes when I'm with others, and my social brain shorts out, on the spot. I have lost friends and partners, more than a few times, when my self-awareness vanished and I said some randomly bizarre thing, or completely failed to provide something that was needed.
I'm afraid of myself, that I will do or say the wrong thing at the wrong moment, and lose someone I love.
I have an intellectual partner with whom I've worked many years now. We've come up with all sorts of great stuff, from AI tech to New Math to an interdisciplinary discovery methodology. But the best thing we've come up with is an anthropological model for human social behavior.
And that model, applied to the world around us today, doesn't say much for our chances of survival. I'm afraid of what I know.
M
I live in a cave - yes, we can say man-cave - and for the moment, none of my kids are with me (though they boomerang with regularity). I enjoy solitude only insofar as it allows me all the time and space I need to write and compose and study. But the stillness takes little bites out of me, day in and day out. Loneliness is never far, and it is a spectre to me.
I'm afraid of being alone - and dying alone, especially.
(Why is he telling us this?)
I'm telling you this, first of all, to connect with you. There may not be witches in your closet or ICBMs in your dreams; your kids may be alright and you may not live alone, but you'd got things that frighten you. Anyone who doesn't is either crazy or lying. Our fears may be diverse, but the fact of fear is a tie that binds.
More than that, however, I have listed my fears in order to note how much they've changed; what frightened me before has passed; and what frightens me today may, as well.
What will frighten me tomorrow?
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