Before They Were Night Vale #8: An essay on fear

 Welcome to "Before They Were Night Vale", our feature in which Night Vale creators Jeffrey and Joseph share writing from before their Welcome to Night Vale collaboration, along with commentary. Come explore their early writing, both good and bad.  

JOSEPH: Back in 2014, Mara Wilson (voice of the Faceless Old Woman) started a reading series in New York City called "What Are You Afraid Of?". Each event, a few performers  would read an essay on the subject of fear. Eventually, Mara got this reading series a spot at Joe's Pub at the Public, about as prestigious a venue as you can get for a NY event like this. So I was deeply grateful and flattered when she invited me to be one of the readers for the Joe's Pub event. Below is the essay I read. It's about what I'm afraid of, which is most things. Enjoy.

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I love horror movies. 

I love movies where the doorway that’s slightly out of focus just over the shoulder of the person who thinks they’re safe suddenly has some Thing standing in it. I love movies where what starts a fun day out soon turns into a deadly game of life and death. I love movies that almost never give us a happy ending, and yet still leave us feeling exhilarated. 

I love horror movies because they are true to life. In horror there is a profoundly baffling and fundamentally impossible to understand force running underneath our everyday life. A force that shapes us, takes us to places we never thought we’d go, and ultimately kills us, but at the same time, before that point, leaves us feeling for some reason exhilarated, and excited to experience more. The horror genre is the most realistic document of what a human life is actually like. That, and history.

I love horror movies but I am rarely scared by them. Serial killers, zombies, possessions, those don’t get to me. I’m scared of only a few specific things.

Most prominently, I’m terrified of that Japanese horror cliché that got introduced to the US with The Ring. A frail, sickly woman or child, moving in a strange way.  Killing people just by walking weirdly near them. It gets me every time.

After seeing The Ring when I was 14 years old, I spent my entire high school years terrified, every time I opened by bedroom door, that a small damp child would be in my hallway and thus somehow I would die. My bedroom door looked out directly to where the tv was, and so for years, literally for years, I would open that door and expect to see a character from a movie, even though I didn’t believe in ghosts or monsters. But my imagination did, and my imagination was more powerful than me. 

It wasn’t, and this is true, until I saw Kill Bill a few years later that I was able to get over The Ring. I imagined Uma Thurman in her yellow jumpsuit, and I imagined her fighting The Ring girl. And by picturing one movie character defeating another movie character, I felt ok about things again. I wasn’t afraid anymore. One part of my imagination protected me from another part. This is true. This is how a brain works. This is what brains do. I don’t know whether we should be proud of this. I’m kind of proud of it.

I think what gets me every time about these ghosts is how confusing they are. Here is a person, frail, small, that would have a difficult time even mildly hurting me, let alone murdering me. And yet they are being presented as a threatening attacker. And that combination of harmless person presented as threatening short-circuits something in my brain and suddenly I’m terrified of them because at some deep level my brain just doesn’t understand what the fuck is going on there.

The fear is misplaced fear. But the fear exists precisely because it is misplaced.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of windows, specifically uncovered windows. Not all the time, but sometimes, a window that was open to the outside world would become this focus of dread for me. I’d become convinced that, just moments from then, some horrible thing would look through the window. I’d see it, and it would see me. I could picture this thing circling slowly around the house, whether it was night or even in the middle of the day. It was coming, and it would be at that window very soon. And I have no idea what it looked like, what could be so horrible that just seeing it would end me, but I could picture it coming nonetheless. I’d have to go to a room that had no windows, or had all the windows covered. This lasted well into my teenage years. I’m mostly ok now, although very occasionally I still do get a sudden fixation on an uncovered window and aren’t comfortable until I leave the room or pull the blinds.

I was afraid of windows because they couldn’t hurt me, because nothing was actually ever going to be looking back in at me. The world outside, that could hurt me, I should of been afraid of that, but the windows couldn’t, and so instead I was afraid of them. 

It was a misplaced fear.

Now I’m terrified of flying. This was a relatively recent development. As a child and a teenager, when I still needed to hide from windows in my house, I could sit through a bumpy snowstorm landing while calmly reading a book. But now… I fly a lot for my work. It never gets better. I fly, and I’m terrified. Interestingly, the only way I can handle it is if I’m in view of an uncovered window. I need to be able to look out the airplane window and see what’s going on. Generally what’s going on is clouds.

Flying is safe. I’m aware of that. The fact makes no difference. I’m not really afraid of flying, I’m afraid of dying, and so instead I’m afraid of flying. It’s a misplaced fear.

I think maybe all fears are misplaced. We are afraid of things that can’t hurt us, because it’s easier than thinking about the things that can hurt us. The gap between our anxiety about something else, and the non-threatening nature of whatever we’re fixating on short-circuits something and we become afraid of that non-threatening thing. 

Fear exists because it is misplaced. 

But what about when it isn’t misplaced? In the summer of 2009 I started having crippling panic attacks about death. That’s a short and uninteresting story and it goes: I had crippling panic attacks about death and then I stopped having them and I don’t know why. The end. You may have had a similar story happen to you. \

A few years before that, in his mid-40s, my dad started having heart problems. He was told he wouldn’t last much longer. He did, though. He ate an absurdly restrictive diet and cut out alcohol and caffeine. He couldn’t run anymore. He took dozens of pills a day. But he lasted. 

And he was afraid, of course. 

My dad read books about anxiety and dealing with irrational fear. But the problem, he would tell me, is that his fear was not irrational. His heart didn’t work. And he would almost definitely die from it sooner or later, but not that much later, and probably much, much sooner. 

He went in for a minor surgery in 2011, one that wasn’t even supposed to involve an overnight stay, and he almost died on the table and then they drove him to Cedar Sanai and put him in the cardiac intensive care unit and told him he would need a new heart, and that he was the highest priority on the transplant list. And we, the family, gathered around him and hoped for some healthy young person to die in tragic circumstances, which is what you do when you are waiting for someone you love to get a heart. You hope a young person you do not know will die in an accident as soon as possible. 

The young people of Los Angeles were better drivers than usual that week.

And he died. It’s ok. You don’t have to feel bad about it. You didn’t know him. You have no obligation to feel anything about someone you didn’t know dying awhile back. It’s really ok.

But I do want you to think about this. He was afraid of his heart failing. And it did. And he died. 

Was his fear misplaced? 

We’re afraid of death, because it implies that we don’t matter or because we don’t know what happens after it or because we think we do. But we just are temporary, and that’s an essential part of our nature. It’s ok that my dad is gone. It’s ok to me, even. Not to say that I don’t feel things about it. I do. But he existed, and now he’s gone, and everything goes, and it’s ok. It’s really ok. 

Given my genetics, my heart will likely kill me too, sooner or later. And not that much sooner, but also not that much later. That’s also ok.

We are insignificant and fleeting but we wouldn’t be us, how we are, if we were otherwise.

So this thing we are afraid of can’t hurt us. Because it’s just part of us. We might as well be afraid of being born, of our own bodies. Our fear of death, even that is misplaced fear. 

So if all fear is misplaced fear. If we’re only afraid of what can’t hurt us. If the world is full of dangers and sharp edges, and if life is just a numbers game where your odds get smaller and smaller and then you lose, if all of that is true and yet none of that is actually something to be afraid of, if all of that is misplaced fear, it raises the question: What actually is there to be afraid of? I don’t know. But one of these days, one of us will pass by an uncovered window, and we’ll look outside and we will see it, and it will see us, and then, then we will know.