In 2013, a game studio called Naughty Dog released a game called The Last of Us, a game that is probably the most influential thing in gaming in the last 30 years. It’s world, and it’s main story, in my opinion, is one that is filled with fear. The fear of loss. In the first game, Joel is a man that has been broken by loss. Broken each time he had to lose someone. And broken each time he had to make someone lose. It’s a story of death by a thousand cuts. Joel represents the last of the people that remember the world before. The world that wasn’t broken. The world that wasn’t governed by fear. But then he meets Ellie. This sweet, innocent, but at the same time brash little girl, that reminds him of someone he had lost before. A girl that doesn’t remember the world before. And at first, he resists. He resists feeling. He resists feeling because, in this world he lives in, he knows loss is around the corner. And he’s afraid of going through it again. But at the end of the first game, he makes a choice. An indefensible choice. But a choice nonetheless. A choice based on love. He had allowed himself to feel again.
But love and fear are just a degree separated. And its a choice that, in the second game, leads to the very thing he was afraid of. Loss. Loss of the person he now loved. In the most poignant scene of the second game, Ellie berates Joel for making that choice for her. For not letting her life matter. She doesn’t consider that her life did matter. It mattered to him. Selfish of him, yes. He knows it. It’s in his body language. He feels shame. But in it we get the last glimpse of the old defiant Joe. Here in the last conversation he was ever going to have with Ellie, there was a sense of confidence. He is sure in what he is saying. “If somehow the lord gave me the chance in that moment, I would do it, all over again.”
The Fear of Rejection
When I started this blog, only a handful of people knew about it. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with it. I was writing, and keeping it to myself. Those who knew kept asking me to share it. But I resisted. My sister at one time said something that made me reconsider. She said “art is meant to be seen.” A pretty compelling argument. And still, I resisted. For seven months straight, I had a blog that no one knew about. Why was I resisting? Fear. I was afraid that if I shared it, people would reject it. Especially the people close to me. I wasn’t even afraid of the loud rejection. Just the silent type. The type where the people you expect to care don’t (as you can tell, I have a history with rejection, but that’s a story for another day). But I was at a point where I think I had been a coward for so long. And I didn’t want to be a coward anymore. And the only way to get over my cowardice was through exposure therapy. Do the thing that scares you the most. Expose yourself to rejection.
I hadn’t ever posted a WhatsApp status ever. Like ever. I posted one sharing an article early 2023. I hadn’t been on social media for seven years straight. That month, I made my first LinkedIn post. And while what I did may seem trivial now, it was scary as hell. It took all of me to do these things. I couldn’t sit down for hours after I had posted. But it was done. I had crossed what seemed like an insurmountable hurdle. And I came out the other side seemingly fine. And from then on, that fear, while still there, had lost some of its lustre.
Of Switches Turning On
Having something we care deeply about grounds us. For most men, we go a long time with nothing to really care about. But I believe there’s a certain subset of men for whom a switch turns on, and never turns off. It’s the switch that makes you realize that there’s a slim chance - a very slim one - that you can do something bigger than yourself. You see it. You see it clearly. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. But in the process of satrting to do it, you realize some things. First, that to achieve this goal, it is going to need you to step out of your comfort zone and into unknown territory. And there’s few things scarier to man than the unknown. That’s why we build homes. Have the same friends. Date the same people (not literally, but figuratively). It’s familiar and known. And stepping into the unknown inflicts a certain amount of fear. Second, you realize that you are going to have to carry a burden like no other to achieve this goal. A burden that you’re not sure you can carry. That inflicts another kind of fear. Finally, you realize that it is going to be painful if you fail. And if you’re smart, you will know that the odds of failure far overwhelm the odds of success. And that inflicts another fear, the fear of failure.
So, you are unsure as to whether to go after that vision you have. A logical man will chose not to. The odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you. You are probably going to fail. But that switch doesn’t function on logic or reason. And it doesn’t turn off. It is the closest thing to the voice of God than many men will ever hear. There are usually fifty reasons not to do something. There is usually one reason to do it. You’ve got to weight them out. Because there’s pain either way. There is a lot of pain in not trying. Choose which one you can live with.
The Fear of Criticism
A few months into sharing this blog, another kind of fear kicked in. A fear that made me want to quit. It began as the fear of misinterpretation. I have written a few articles where someone has come to me with their understanding of what I mean. And it has sometimes been completely different from what I intended. Its mostly attributable to my writing style, which is sometimes abstract and seemingly scattered. It made me worry that there might be a case where something I said is highly misinterpreted. And that’s a dangerous thing in this cancel culture environment. But I got to terms with it. If I obsessed over interpretation, I’d never write. And that, to me, would be to give my power, my gift away. It would be submitting to the fear.
And then I got criticized. And it wasn’t a subtle criticism. It was a detailed one. And one of those criticisms that you can’t argue away. At least not to yourself. And that hurt my ego, way more than I thought it would. Because in that moment, I entertained the fact that I wasn’t as good a person as I thought I was. This destabilized me for a while. It is emotionally harder to accept you are wrong than it is to believe that you are right. It created a form of PTSD for a time after that, where I was trying to figure out how to go about writing in a way that avoids that kind of criticism. My ego wasn’t sound enough to take those kinds of hits. Even after all that work to get rid of the fear, it was still there. Insidious as always.
Fear and Anger
When you chase an animal, say a cat, it will run away in fear. And it will run so long as there is space to run. But if you corner the cat, such that it has nowhere for it to go, the cat will turn that fear into anger. And it will use this anger to fight back. To fight for its life. Wherever there is fear, there is anger. Anger suppresses fear. Anger can be a good outlet for the fear. Like Eminem said, when life’s a drag, don’t cry, get mad. But this is only if done carefully. Because anger, just like fear, has spillover effects that can easily affect everyone around you. On a few occasions, I have turned fear into anger. This has the effect of pushing you two steps forward, one step back. Anger provides a level of drive that is hard to get any other way. And if used well, it does help in getting a lot done. Some of the stuff I’m most proud of came from a point of fear and dread, and thus anger. Fear that the world is what it is, not what I want it to be. That people are who they are, not what I want them to be. But it can lead to some missteps, where you find yourself doing something you don’t particularly like or want. There is stuff that I’ve written - things that I’ve done - out of anger and frustration. Stuff that I’d do a little different now. But it was because I didn’t take time to articulate the fear. To face that fear.
Integrating Fear
Fear is incredibly salient in us. Our brains are tuned to it. It signifies danger. When we hear a twig breaking behind us in the dark, we don’t think “that’s my friend, Mark.” We immediately go into fight or flight mode. But this is wiring that worked for us in the wilderness. We’ve been out of it for thousands of years. Fear, in todays world, is a lot less important. And I’ve found that when we turn around and face that fear, it often disappears. Into the ether. Like smoke. When it doesn’t, then you have a wonderful opportunity to integrate the fear. To sit with it. To find out what exactly it is saying. And integrate it into what you do going forward. Your fear will show you where to step carefully. You can’t ignore fear. It exists for a reason. It is telling you something about the environment, and about yourself. The bravest you can be is not to others, but to yourself. To sit by yourself and listen to the worst voices in your head. To stop running from yourself. Because if you run from yourself, you are always going to be running. As for me, I listened to the fear. And my answer to it was a line from SZA’s song, Far. If nobody wants you, you’re free.