In the interest of Being Festive, let’s talk about the space of fear! Because is there a better way to celebrate holidays than by writing essays? I think not. I wrote about fear last Halloween from the self-care angle. This year I’ll examine it from my Make Space angle. If you haven’t already, you can catch up here with Part 1: Clutter and Part 2: Listening!
I aim to approach this from two angles. First, by asking what the space of fear looks like; and second, by looking at what it pushes out. Disclaimer here (that I usually forget to add because apparently I just can’t be bothered to spend the time remembering) that I am not am expert, I just like to read all the things and then regurgitate unsolicited thoughts back out. Enjoy!
The Space of Fear
Fear can be roughly separated into two types: acute and chronic. Acute is short-lived, usually a response to a situation, lasting basically as long as your body can produce adrenaline. This can range from tripping on the sidewalk (brief burst of adrenaline, very short time being afraid) to being followed at night (more sustained adrenaline, longer period of fear). Chronic is fear that persists either longer than the danger, or danger that persists longer than your body can physically respond.
Technically speaking, what I’m describing as chronic fear is actually anxiety. There are some nuances, but basically anxiety is fear without a concrete source. As far as I’m concerned, for the purposes of this blog, “fear without a concrete source” is still fear.
When you’re in that space of fear, it doesn’t feel great. You feel like you’re being closed in. Every decision you face is more fraught. If it’s chronic, you feel more tired, because your body is working overtime to keep you alive. Fear takes up a lot of room and it doesn’t like to share. It invades and tinges everything else with its color: its murk of tension, exhaustion, apprehension, and apathy.
Spoons
When the space available to you is taken up with fear, there’s less space left for other things. You have less bandwidth to deal with additional problems, even the minor ones. And you have less space to devote to anything outside yourself: fear is forcing you to spend your energy on yourself, on keeping yourself alive.
A popular metaphor in the disability community is that of spoons. When you’re living with a chronic illness, you often have less energy or are more quickly depleted than someone who isn’t. Spoons represent your units of energy, of which you have a set number that only recharges with rest and sleep. Living with chronic fear is, in effect, living with a chronic illness.
What We Fear
Before we go any further, let’s build some context. As I write this, we’re in the seventh month of dealing with a historic pandemic that has so far killed over a million people worldwide, almost a quarter of those in the United States alone. This has severely strained our already threadbare social safety net. While the official unemployment rate is relatively low, this fails to count people who have dropped out of the workplace to take care of children who now aren’t in school full time, people whose industries have disappeared, or all of the people who are underemployed.
This is all in addition to all the “usual” causes of fear that were around before the pandemic, and will remain after it. These range from existential threats such as climate change to personal fears for our own success and well-being.
What Impacts Our Fears
Of course our fears don’t live in isolation. They are rooted in the condition of the world we inhabit. A world that leaves individuals to fend for themselves is inherently more fearful than one that establishes a community to delegate burdens of care. A world with lots of inequality is more fearful on both ends. On the bottom end of the spectrum, there is more fear for basic necessities. On the top end, there’s the fear that comes from the prospect of losing privilege should the inequality fail to persist. Naturally, this creates additional tension between those who would like to live more comfortably and those who benefit from others having less.
The Space That’s Left
So what is outside the space of fear? What gets pushed out? When we’re in a space of fear, our attention is focused inwards, on getting ourselves through the fear. That means there is less room for other people — less room for caring about them. A parent who is overwhelmed with trying to pay bills and put food on the table is going to have a harder time being present for their children. Someone working multiple jobs to stay afloat is going to have much less space to think about things like politics. A student who doesn’t know where her next meal will come from is going to have a harder time focusing in class. A black man who is afraid of being summarily executed by police or an immigrant afraid of deportation is going to have a harder time moving around freely in society.
It’s also easier to fall back onto more base instincts when faced with fear. With your reduced space, it’s harder to devote any of your remaining bandwidth to complex or nuanced thoughts. Again, it’s a game of survival. The condition of your fellow people need only apply as they directly and visibly relate back to you. You can get so used being attacked that you see potential attacks in every action around you — and react accordingly.
A Society in the Space of Fear
Fear is a potent emotion. It’s pretty good at keeping us alive by grabbing our attention when a threat presents itself. That same mechanism is ripe for exploitation, by its very nature. One of the easiest ways of getting people’s attention is through fear. Be it real or manufactured, fear has a natural leg up on other emotions when it comes to selling ideas.
Fear is also a powerful controlling mechanism: if you do x, then scary y thing will happen. If you cheat on your test, then you’ll get detention. If you break the law, then you’ll go to jail. Or maybe if you just break some norm, you’ll face vigilante “justice”.
Society doesn’t have to operate based on fear, though. Just because it is a sticky emotion, that doesn’t make it the most effective. Machiavelli might have preferred to be feared to maintain power, but a society operating in a space of fear has the same problems as an individual in a space of fear. There’s less space for growth, for creativity, for anything other than bare survival. We have other tools at our disposal. We can lessen the fears that people face.
Mitigating the Space of Fear
Fear is mitigated with action. Being able to do something about whatever is worrying you can dramatically cut down on how fearful you feel. We often face problems that are bigger than what we can deal with at once, on our own; or we have anxieties about things over which we have no control at all. In these cases, it’s good to try and do what we can, what we have the space and the spoons for, and then learn to set the rest aside — not forever, but until we have the space to pick it back up.
I wrote in my last blog about making space for those who need it, if you have the space to spare. There are groups in our world who chronically face more fear than others, which chronically cuts down on the space available to them. For most of the history of the United States, various laws encoded a system in which black people were at the bottom of society, and held there by fear. While those overt laws have been replaced, the ingrained attitudes take much longer to erase. Other minorities face similar obstacles. Women have had to fear violence from men for as long as humanity has existed. Members of the LGBT communities have long been given reasons to fear living openly. The list goes on.
Making space for others doesn’t mean speaking for them. It means giving them the space for their own expression. It means using what excess power you might have to allow someone else a break from their burden of fear. Overall, it means living in a less fearful world.
