A sort of low-level fear, mostly of social encounters: fear of being sucked in, swept away, manipulated by people who have access to power or popularity or local knowledge. Fear of losing my essential identity in a hostile crowd.
I went to a cafe last night on a whim that I’d never eaten in before and I realised just how strange that experience was to me. I spend most of my time walking through my city but never really feeling safe, comfortable, at home in it. Even in my home town I feel like a resident alien, ill at ease. As if at any time strangers might unfold from the shadows and beckon with switchblades or Lugers to my nightmare.
I avoid the bars, loud music and drunken laughter makes me nervous, bouncers standing in doorways make me feel defensive, not protected, crowds make me instinctively go into startle mode. I shy away from eye contact unless with long-time friends, I prefer safe, scripted interactions. A place where I can bring a book is comfortable, but even cafe menus make me apprehensive. What unwritten rule of dress or behaviour am I breaking, how uncool or out of place am I, what is the script for this place and has it changed since the last time I was here?
It’s not about the big fears. Tidal waves, car bombs, viral outbreaks don’t really register on the plausible-fear scale here (though my dreams are filled with a background of apocalyptic devastation and have been since childhood; but that’s normal, isn’t it? For anyone born in the 70s? The end of the Cold War, premature cancellation of Armageddon, that was the unthinkable shock.) No, it’s the small fears: the constant, tiny accumulation of in-group, out-group, cool-hunting, fashion; the deceptive water-bright surface of the social puzzle, that shimmers and changes and is never where it was last time, where the rules are always wrong and you’re always the one left out and nobody can ever tell you why, even as you drown, because that would spoil the game -
That’s what the real kind of fear is about. The kind you wake up screaming (or sobbing) in the night from, and immediately forget what you were dreaming. The kind of nightmare you don’t talk about, you don’t make horror movies about, you don’t even make comedy about.
The things so small, nobody ever thinks to talk about them, because nobody’s afraid of that, surely? Except misfits, geeks, nerds. And you’re not one of those.
Are you?
