On fear, joy, and getting in the water
Hold onto your hats, we're diving in
Hey crew, how are you? How’s your heart?
My life is feeling like: limbo & excitement & newness & departure & adventurous
And also:
I’m fearful. Afraid. Scared.
I’m afraid of a lot of things.
I’m really noticing just how afraid I am. Like all the time.
The last few months have been a big reckoning for me around the ways in which fear is a focal point of my life. I say this with compassion for myself and not judgement - I learned to be fearful of life from someone who was afraid, she learned from someone who was afraid and the family lineage of fearful, anxious mothers rolls back farther than my little stints on ancestry dot com will take me.
I could wax poetic on how I am afraid of life and that it shows up by me finding reasons to not leave my house, by me blocking my own way, by checking locks and windows, by creating rituals to sustain a semblance of safety around me, by not changing course even when I’m miserable. The fear itself is a belief rooted deep in my heart, a belief I never asked for but inherited anyways.
The biggest fear above all is fish.
When I was 15, I didn’t yet know the term Ichthyophobia, phobia of fish, but it was at that age when it suddenly clicked for me that all those years experiencing panic when I was around fish, alive or dead, wasn’t just hatred or an aversion, but actual terror. This is what all my doctors and therapists over the years called “severe phobia” and no amount of EMDR or talk therapy was resolving it.
This story is slightly about how I have PTSD symptoms when I am around fish, but mainly this story is about how joy fills my heart, my body, my soul when I’m swimming.
I’ve come to this point in my life where not engaging in the things that make me feel alive is more painful than the fear I hold. I’m starting to do more, see more, experience more because life has been loudly knocking in a way I can’t unhear.
This point comes up strongly around fish. I’m not saying I’d like to sit at a table across from a dead fish on a plate (I couldn’t cope with that) but something about the joy of swimming, the joy of water has brought me into such aliveness that even the panic I feel from fish has less of a death grip on me.
In other words, dear reader, I am becoming more alive.
I am touching on the greatest gift of being human - to acknowledge one’s fears and still take the leap into the place where joy lives.
The other week I went to Meanjin/Brisbane for the first time to visit a friend. She took me down to the Gold Coast where we hiked at Springbrook National Park on Yugambeh Land. The forest was wet, the vines were so thick I couldn’t wrap my hand all the way around, everything smelled…green. A fragrance of living earth, of running water, dark mud, sharp rock.
We hiked down to Twin Falls and were met by the most gorgeous rock pool with two massive, loud, pouring waterfalls.
When we got to the base of the pool, it took only minutes before my friend and I were changed into bathing suits and entering the water. There were many other people there but no one was swimming. The water was icy and took my breath away. In the moments I usually spend hesitating, looking for quick shadows darting under the water, seeking out confirmation it’s not safe, I was already diving under. Beaming. Laughing. Joyous. Fearful. Aware. Nervous. Present.
The meeting of these two feelings, fear and joy, is vulnerability. (Yes, I heard this first from Brené Brown and I’m glad I did because it really transformed something in me). I am vulnerable because I feel so afraid and I am vulnerable lowering my walls to feel joy. In this vulnerability: I feel.
When I push away vulnerability, I let the pain of suffering, the fear of life, and fear of togetherness become my dominant experience. I want more than this. I want more than refusal to feel. I want more than fear.
The water was so cold it shocked my lungs but in the way where all you can do is laugh. My hypervigilance wanted to protect me from whatever unknown, unseen fish were in the water, but the pleasure and utter joy of this mossy green water and majestic waterfall took over my experience.
Not all swimming adventures are like this. Sometimes being in the water is inaccessible and sometimes I cry in distressed ways. Sometimes I shame spiral into frustration. Sometimes I have invasive thoughts from the original trauma that frankly have nothing to do with fish and everything to do with fear displacement. Sometimes I try to push myself farther than where my nervous system can handle, but when I actually do feel able to swim, I dive like a dolphin and I’m often the last one still in the water.
Life isn’t about dominating or disappearing fear, life is about aliveness and those things co-exist in the strange, nuanced ways that we humans can sometimes forget.
I’m making my way towards the things that feel like joy, like awe, like surrender, like embodiment, like living. New beliefs come forward to replace the old ones, it hasn’t been easy, but the new beliefs allow me to stretch and experience, and that is all worth it.
I want to make a point that there are things in life that are terrifying that we do not have to find joy in. We’re in a climate crisis, the US and Australia and other places are actively inciting genocide for trans people, white supremacy is enacting horrific violence across the globe, we’re in a cost of living and housing crisis, the global pandemic still carries on. Sometimes things are just scary and hard. I am only trying to take note of the things in my life that I am afraid of that are not systemic, that are things I can control and find room to let go of.
I meet fear on a long, dark hallway / I meet joy somewhere near / and let my full breath expand / my lungs / the water cold / gripping almost / it’s here that I straddle between / aliveness and the constriction of a terrified death / union, or something as bountiful as my / life.
<3 you.
Nic
