Why fear speaks to me

PERSPECTIVE | The honesty and vulnerability of fear inspires me

When I was 6-years-old, I was in a serious car accident. This set the stage for my fascination with fear and my compulsion to illustrate what people are scared of.

One autumn day in 1966, my dad was cruising down Route 9 in Wellesley, Mass., before he crashed into a telephone pole. I smashed through the front windshield. If I pulled through, doctors told my parents, I’d be a vegetable.

They were wrong.

Within two weeks, I was out of the hospital, and I recovered fully. (My dad and 4-year-old sister also recovered from their injuries, which were not as severe.)

To this day, I have hazy post-crash memories: waking up in the hospital and staring at my blood-soaked arms; lying in a hospital ward and running my tongue over the strange-tasting ointment swabbed over my damaged upper lip; feeling the tight wad of cotton stuffed into my broken nose; listening to the cries of other injured or sick children who shared a room with me.

I can still clearly recall the car ride home from the hospital — the cloudless sky was bright blue and the sun shone brightly. I was petrified we’d crash again. Sitting in the back seat of a large, clunky convertible, I begged my father to slow down the entire way home. This was my first taste of what all-consuming fear felt like.

Fear lurked in my life as I got older, but it never paralyzed me. I pushed through whatever anxieties I experienced as an adult. I worked at many different jobs, lived in different states, went to graduate school, hiked the Appalachian Trail, got married twice, divorced once, joined the Peace Corps, studied French in my 50s and talked in front of large groups of people. I deliberately jumped into whatever scared me most.

Until about five years ago, I had thought, naively, that getting older meant acquiring more wisdom and a big shot of fearlessness. I should have known better, but I didn’t.

I tapped into storytelling mode. I had worked for newspapers for 15 years before entering the academic world full time almost 13 years ago, and it felt natural for me to want to transform what I was feeling into some sort of visual narrative.

I decided to explore fear from the mindset of a collector. Through other people’s words and my visuals, I started creating illustrations of common and not-so-common fears that others shared with me. The scope of the project’s participants has grown over time: friends, colleagues, students, family members, acquaintances, and many people I’ve never met — all have shared their fears with me.

Their fears have included death, failure, losing a child, losing one’s voice, losing one’s mind, centipedes in the shower, needles, cancer’s return, speaking honestly with one’s spouse, déjà vus, seaweed, biscuits and clusters of small holes.

To my surprise, the project immediately resonated with people. Early on, many subjects of my illustrations shared with me that seeing a tangible representation of their fears helped them to feel less burdened by them.

One woman expressed her fear to me of being in love with her childhood sweetheart for the rest of her life, even though she was happily married to an “amazing, supportive husband.”

After I completed an illustration of her fear, I sent her a digital copy. “Seeing my fear — I mean, in a sort of tangible way — makes it less scary and gives me a sense of peace,” she wrote to me in an email. “The fear felt like a bowling ball that I kept holding, but now I’ve thrown it. It’s still out there — might always be out there — but I don’t feel like I’m weighed down.”

People have often asked me if it brings me down to confront this litany of fears. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’m inspired by people’s honesty and vulnerability as they talk about whatever scares them.

Fear is an excellent conversation starter, I’ve found. And in the middle of hearing everyone’s stories, and sharing a few of my own, I am once again reminded that you and I, we are not alone.

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