There are a few different kinds of fear, and some are more useful than others.
There is the fear you experience when you are faced with an immediate threat. A huge tiger with drooling canines jumps out at you as you’re on your way to Morrisons for some bleach. Chances are this will raise some fear in you, and good, you now have a tiger to deal with. Some adrenaline and focused senses will help.
Of course, we may get confused in life about what an immediate threat really is, and respond like this to things that look very much like tigers, but are actually made of paper – we can feel hunted by things that aren’t really chasing us, but that’s another matter for another time.
What I am interested in here is something different. Not exactly another fear even, but dread.
This dread is different. It doesn’t leap at you from behind the bushes, it is quieter, more atmospheric, more background. It sits behinds things and colours everything. It is close friends with dread, despair and doom, they spend a lot of time together, and they exhausting company. They spend their time sapping you of vitality, draining your soul and your body and your whole self of energy, life and enthusiasm.
It’s a feeling that nothing is going to go right, things will go against you, everything is too complicated, too much, too fragile, too likely to fall apart. It tells you not to trust beauty when it appears, or not to relax when things are going well or that there will be a cost, a catch, a punishment, a pay-off. Something good may even happen for you, but even then dread finds a way in: it has made you believe that it will probably be taken from you soon enough and that life can’t and never will be simply beautiful, straightforward, fun, easy, enjoyable.
In it’s grip, it doesn’t just make life harder, but smaller. Desire, spontaneity, fun, enthusiasm, hope – these are signs of life and vitality that dread gradually robs us of little by little every day. When you’re in dread, you might assume it belongs entirely to you, that it is your own private and secret failing and weakness, your own unique inability to cope with life. I don’t think it is just personal. I’d say:
A huge amount of modern dread comes from culture.
In the west, we have created a way of life that is depressing in it’s most literaly sense: it presses us down with constant demands, endless duties, noise, pressure, comparison, productivity, performance, bullshit, bills, admin, nonsense, likes, notifications…it goes on and on and on. It brings with it a feeling that we are always behind, always needed, always failing. Every. Single. Day.
It’s no surprise then that so many people are knackered. Absolutely shattered by modern existence, flat, irritable, anxious, numb, despairing – anything but full of life. Unsure who they are or how to cope.
The life sapping energy of this fear is like a powerful hoover, behind you sucking everything toward it and sustaining itself on your energy whilst keeping you glued the spot, frozen, stuck. And the scariest thing? If you were to turn and look behind you, you wouldn’t see one monster, or even a thousand, or even a million. It would be far stranger: an entire culture, a billion or more, paper tigers all roaring at once:
Be better.
Make more money.
Be more than you are.
Meet the deadline.
Meet this expectation.
Be impressive.
Keep up.
Be attractive.
Know what you’re doing.
Don’t fall behind.
And on and on. But because they all do it at once, it can create an overwhelming roar, a cacophony of sound that can feel real. More than just real, maybe even fate. These are the roars and moans of a world that has forgotten how to live, speaking through your own nervous system.
If that’s where you find yourself, it’s not just you. And, it really is time to find a new perspective.
A new perspective begins with recognition.
You begin to notice that you have indeed fallen into dread. You start to see the atmosphere that has been in the background of your life every day. You ask: is this mine? Is this really true? Am I faced with an actual tiger, or am I living as if the world is one?
Slowly, you begin to reclaim your life from the collective and become an individual again, able to tell the difference between danger and dread, what is yours and what is not. You get your Self back, the real one, the one that can manage, will be able to face whatever comes it’s way and will probably even make something of it.
So know this:
There is no requirement in life to live forever under the cloud of dread.
You are allowed to feel liberated and alive.
You can trust moments of beauty.
You have yourself, and that is more, more, more than enough to face whatever comes your way. You will be okay.
Therapy doesn’t help with pretending there are no tigers or that all is well, but it can be immensely helpful for learning to see the difference between tigers, paper tigers, and what is an inherited dread from an exhausting and life-denying culture.
If you are interested in working with me, you can book a consultation here.
