The joy of fear

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. … You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt

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This quote is a touchstone for me; my main intention in starting this blog was to chronicle my attempts to follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and thereby become a stronger, braver, more confident version of myself. I’ve mentioned this quote to dozens of people over the years, and almost every time, the person I’m talking to brings up a time that s/he “felt the fear and did it anyway.” This week, though, two very different people who have never met each other responded to the quote in a very different, and (to me, at least) unusual way: both said that they were so stubborn and determined that they couldn’t remember ever thinking anything was beyond them as long as they tried hard enough.

I have to admit that I found this completely incomprehensible. Never felt intimidated or overwhelmed? Never endured insecurity or self-doubt? Never suspected they’d bitten off more than they could chew? Never worried about what other people would think or how they might react? Never feared the repercussions of going against the crowd?  Never hesitated, even briefly, to say, “I wonder if this is going to work out”?

Never? Not even once?

That seems more than impossible to me; it seems superhuman.

But the flip side — being ruled by doubt — seems equally impossible. I confess that I’ve certainly  hung back, kept quiet, delayed, denied, avoided, procrastinated, made excuses, taken the path of least resistance, or simply gone along with the crowd from time to time. The axiom about how the nail that sticks up gets hammered down rings all too true for me some days. Let’s face it: it’s a lot easier, plain and simple, not to do the things you think you can’t do.

But it’s also not as satisfying.

There’s joy in looking fear in the face. In standing up for yourself. In defending someone else. In risking rejection. In entering competition. In challenging conventional wisdom. In claiming authority. In setting boundaries. In examining your preconceptions. In defying your prejudices. In redefining your priorities. In confronting your phobias. In speaking your mind, as activist Maggie Kuhn said, “even if your voice shakes.”

Fear — not terror, but a healthy concern for consequences — is part of the human condition. It’s normal to think you can’t do something. It’s also normal to go ahead and give it a shot anyhow.

This week, find something you didn’t think you could do, and then do it. And come back here and tell me about it.

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Putting the “end” in “friend”

Yesterday morning, I had a perfectly friendly phone conversation with someone who’s been acting as my self-appointed “life coach” for a few months. We’d been out of touch for a couple of weeks, so it was time for a check-in. He asked about my hair (still growing), my weight (at my goal and holding), my chest cold (gone at last, although he clucked like a mother hen about how important it was for me to stay out of the rain for a while longer). Then he made an extremely earthy comment about sex. He’s characteristically blunt and I am demonstrably hard to shock, so I assumed he was, as they say, having me on a bit. I laughed and replied that I was willing to acknowledge that there’s always room to learn new things, but that I didn’t think I needed coaching in that regard. We moved on to other topics. Eventually, we agreed to meet for coffee on some future, less rainy day, and I got back to work, thinking nothing of it.

Eight hours later, I received email saying he felt he’d crossed a line, was sorry, had realized that he was becoming uncomfortable in our friendship, and was therefore letting me know that he had decided to draw it to a close. Have a nice life, bye.

Imagine my astonishment.

I never asked for someone to manifest in my life in a coach/mentor role — he suggested it. For reasons I still don’t understand, he took me on as a bit of a project, volunteering to help me approach the second half of my life with a bit more grace and savoir-faire than I used in careening through the first half. Yes, he advised me about improving my appearance, because that’s one of his areas of expertise. But we also spent a lot of time sitting around over coffee, talking about philosophy, literature, and so forth. When I was sick last month, he dropped cold medicine in my mailbox and called me every few days to check on me. I never experienced his attention as a come-on; it was a teacherly/parental vibe.

I graciously accepted all of his advice, took on what made sense to me, experimented with a few things that pushed my limits, and quietly ignored what clearly wasn’t for me. His pontificating and opining sometimes worked my nerves, and I sometimes felt that he simply liked having an audience, but in truth, there was a lot of wheat among that chaff. Every time we had a conversation, I literally sat for half an hour afterwards writing out notes. He told me several times, sometimes in exactly these words, “I see a lot of potential in you, and I want to help you achieve it.” I welcomed that as something I haven’t had much of in my life. Hell, I ate it up. I’d be lying through my shiny white teeth if I said I wouldn’t miss it.

What’s really interesting, though, is my response to this abrupt and unexpected ending. My first reaction was, “Oh no, what did I do wrong?” That startled me. As I thought about it more, I discovered two uncomfortable truths:

First, while I ordinarily balk at authority figures and rebel whenever I perceive that someone is trying to control me, I really liked having this parent/teacher/mentor figure telling me what to do. And second, I really liked the approval and praise I got when I followed his instructions.

On some level, there’s still a little kid in me who feels confused by the world, very much in need of guidance, and grateful to receive it from someone delivering it in a kind way. That little kid was thinking, “Finally! Someone who has the answers and can give them to me! Someone who can tell me how to get where I want to go!” Now she feels like she’s been told, “Yes, I have the answers, but I’m not going to share them, because I’ve decided you don’t deserve them after all.”

But the truth is, the adult in me knows damn well that whatever my friend’s reason for slamming the door in my face (and that’s precisely what it feels like), it has nothing to do with me, nothing at all. I still have every bit of potential, regardless of whether or not someone else sees and comments on it. It’s up to me to bring it out and put it on display. And I guess that’s my erstwhile coach’s final, and most valuable, lesson.

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Too picky

Yesterday, as I was roaming the city with my camera, my lens cap flew off one too many times, so I ducked into a camera shop on Stockton (or maybe it was Grant) in search of a lens cap leash. I found one, and as long as I was there, I asked the guy to price both a 70-200 lens and a 70-300, and asked his opinion on which he thought was better. After a few minutes of chatting about photography, he got a bit flirty and asked if I was single. I could clearly see he was wearing a wedding ring and he could clearly see I wasn’t, so I shrugged and said yes. He said he found that surprising, given my looks and personality — okay, I do like a nice compliment — but then he said it: “I bet it’s because you’re too picky.”

Now, I realize that the cultural zeitgeist has currently decreed that a straight woman over 30 who’s not coupled up is stubbornly and shallowly holding out for a mythical Perfect 10 rather than giving a fair shake to the poor 6s and 7s she’s overlooking for the minor crime of not having enough money or enough hair. (I also realize that there are, in fact, women who do that, just as some men out there are convinced that even though they’re pretty damn average, they need to stay single because Heidi Klum is going to show up on their doorstep any day now.) And given this ongoing frame that single women are single not only because they expect the moon and stars, but because they don’t realize that’s their problem — this man felt free both to leap to conclusions about me and to voice them, despite knowing nothing about me other than my predilection for Canon cameras.

Yet many women are single not because they expect too much, but because they don’t expect enough — or to be more precise, we expect disappointment. We believe another pernicious canard: if we want love at all, we have to endure the unreliable, uninterested, or unavailable. That’s all that’s left, so we should make the best of it. We know we’re dating frogs and not princes, but we think maybe if we just kiss them enough…

The thing is, if I was judging the state of modern man based only on the festival of misogyny that was yesterday’s Super Bowl advertising, I would be convinced that it’s raining frogs. Madison Avenue apparently believes that if it sank a drill into the male psyche, it would release a gusher of fear and resentment toward women so powerful that we should be terrified to be alone in a room with any boy older than, say, 14. In the world of Sunday’s ads, men now consider women such universally emasculating killjoys that only buying Bud Light, Dockers pants, and a Dodge Charger will prevent their penises from falling off en masse.

And not wanting this makes women too picky?

Fortunately, I have many men-friends who prove Madison Avenue wrong. They’re contentedly, even blissfully coupled and feel their lives are bigger and better for it. If one defines “too picky” as “At a bare minimum, I deserve someone like that, someone who thinks I’m so wonderful that he wants to enjoy my company frequently and exclusively,” well, then, picky is well worth aspiring to be.

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The only thing wrong with you

For many, many years, I thought that there was something wrong with me, something that everyone could see but me. I was never quite sure what it was, though. I struggled to fix what I could and hide what I couldn’t fix, and I was either apologetic or defensive about the things I could neither change nor conceal.

I knew, intellectually, that being myself would be a hell of a lot easier than always trying to be someone else. But emotionally, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Because I had the nagging sense that something about me was fundamentally unlikeable, I was afraid people would reject my true self. Yet despite all my attempts to present only the parts of myself most likely to please the person I was with at the time, I could never be sure if anyone actually liked me. If I stopped fixing and hiding and doing my chameleon routine for even a second, people would immediately realize that the picture on the box didn’t match the contents. And nobody likes being misled.

Trying to appeal to everyone and offend no one is one hell of a double bind. Sisyphus himself would understand what an endless task it is.

One day, though, out of nowhere, I had a remarkable idea: Perhaps the only thing wrong with me is…the idea that something is wrong with me. And I thought, you know, why not behave as though that’s true and see what happens?

It’s such a novel notion that I can’t always hang on to it. To be honest, I have to watch myself constantly to keep from slipping back into the belief that I’m not “good enough” just as I am. If I’m an acquired taste, I worry — despite plenty of evidence to the contrary — that perhaps no one will acquire it.

And yet the little green shoots of the idea keep growing. Maybe the things about me that I’ve thought of as flaws are really just facts, neither good nor bad. And maybe instead of trying to compensate or apologize for them, I should try embracing them.

If I believe that, then I don’t need to fix myself or improve myself, because I’m not broken or inadequate in the first place. I just have to reveal my true self, trusting that while I’m not to everyone’s tastes, I also don’t have to be.

What do you think?

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Made by loving hands at home

I was in 7th grade at the tail end of the ’70s, just before the academic world changed. At the time, 6th grade was the end of elementary school, 10th grade was the beginning of high school, and the three years in between were called “junior high.” Within a few short years, the 9th graders got moved into the high school, the 6th graders took their place in the junior high building, and those in-between years were dubbed “middle school.” Oh, and both Home Ec and Shop became electives.

In my day, though (she said, cursing those young whippersnappers on her lawn), they were a required part of the 7th grade curriculum. Sure, it was end of the ’70s, so a handful of boys signed up for Home Ec, just as a handful of girls signed up for Shop, and we all sang “Free to Be…You and Me” together. (Okay, kidding about that.) But we had to take one or the other. Since I had already discovered that I liked and was fairly good at cooking, I figured I could coast through Home Ec. I was wrong — because cooking was only half the class. The other half was sewing. And instead of coasting, I very nearly failed.

Oh, I learned how to hand-sew a button back on when it fell off, a skill which I’ve managed to retain to that day. But cutting out a pattern, threading a sewing machine, and actually attaching the fabric according to the directions all escaped me. I chose the simplest pattern imaginable — a top essentially made of four squares of fabric stitched together at the corners — in a loud pattern (hey, it was the ’70s) that would hide any mistakes. I worked on it assiduously for days and days. And I could not get it to look anything like something a human being could wear. I think I must have ripped out every seam at least half a dozen times. I got an F; only my good grades on the cooking part of the class allowed me to pass. Oh, the shame.

This scarred me for years. YEARS. In the last 15 years or so, as I watched various friends learn to knit sweaters, sew dresses, string necklaces, bead earrings, and crochet adorable caps with kitty ears, I contented myself with the thought that since other people made perfectly good clothing and accessories, I really had no need to do it myself. Part of me wanted to be crafty, to put my own handmade stamp on my wardrobe — but the rest of me remembered that humiliating semester in 7th grade and shied away from the very thought.

Then, last week, I was contemplating getting rid of my two favorite sweaters. Both are cashmere/wool blend v-neck pullovers, identical but for color, and they’re the softest, lightest, coziest things I’ve ever worn. But one of them had an unrepairable hole under one arm, and the other had a stain just below the point of the v-neck. I started searching the Internet for ways to salvage them, and lo, I found something I could do with even my minimal domestic skills.

I started with the stained sweater, since it was otherwise intact. I washed it in hot water and dried it on high, which shrank it from boxy to snug and felted the yarn so it wouldn’t unravel if I cut into it. Then I sliced it right down the front, from neck to hem. I stitched on some buttons bought at the local fabric store, snipped small buttonholes (the felting saved me from needing to know how to sew a buttonhole), and voila: a cardigan, with one button conveniently hiding the stain. The buttons are unevenly spaced, and it gaps a little bit unless I leave the top button open, but even though it’s an obviously hand-crafted look, it’s not half as amateurishly ugly as I was afraid it might be.

The next one is going to be a little more challenging. I’m going to cut open both side seams on the body and restitch them shut a little more snugly, thus making the sweater more fitted while hiding the hole under one arm inside a seam. I’m not sure if I want to sew it from the inside to make the seams invisible, or use embroidery floss to make visible stitches on the outside. If I do that, I may have to figure out how to make decorative stitches around the neckline, too, just so it looks planned.

It’s a little intimidating, but I feel like I’m finally laying the ghosts of Home Ec to a long-deserved rest.

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