When I was thirteen, I went to camp with a handful of nervously excited teenagers facing the horizon of adulthood. To encourage personal growth and to build a sense of communal trust, our counselors had us each christen a rock with our greatest fear and then let it go—hurling it into the abyss of ocean while diffusing it verbally into the safe circle of bodies. My greatest fear was something I’d never considered, and as we spent several minutes sifting through experience and soul-searching in silence, my mind blanked. I couldn’t pluck one single fear out of the countless worries that lurked in the dark corners of my skull, and yet at the same time, I didn’t consider any single one of them to be notably debilitating in my daily existence. As fears such as
“loneliness”
“death”
and “inferiority,”
were offered, my turn crept nearer and nearer and still my answer refused to arise into my consciousness. When it came time for me to share, I found myself saying, “My greatest fear is of disappointing the people I love.”
Up until this morning, when I picked up my pen for the first time since I began a journaling leave of absence about a year ago, my thirteen-year-old camp memory of my greatest fear had been eradicated from my mind. Today it felt almost unnatural for me to write freely from the inside out. But once I forced myself to dive in, translations of the ancient and hoarded hieroglyphics carved deep within my heart began flowing as easily as a leaf down a stream.
I began reflecting on the past year…
revisiting ugly memories I’d hoped to never visit again,
picking at the same lock I’d worked on for weeks then eventually ignored,
and hunting answers to the questions I was asked repeatedly and repeatedly.
And as I did so, that one, specific memory from camp continued to pop up.
Adrift on a twin-sized raft of muffled voices and desperation,
afraid to acknowledge the cold depths lapping below or the possibilities above,
I chose to get lost in a thick brown and bittersweet fog
that obscured the painful mistakes and the will to construct a happier future
because every way I turned, I found my greatest fear.
I sometimes paralyze beneath the unadulterated eyes of Truth, and
my knees buckle under the intense but purposeful breath of fate.
Maybe this is genetic aftermath gifted to me from my debilitatingly stubborn father.
She thought of it as a stereotypical mentality, engraved into my subconscious by society defining thousands of generations of women.
Perhaps it’s ignorance or selfishness.
But probably it’s just fear.
I spoke to you the other day, and you said, in what I imagined to be a terse tone, “You don’t have to appease everyone.” Maybe now you’ll understand that appeasing everyone is the one thing I desire most, the one thing I fear failing, and that I have learned the hard way that it is impossible.
