So, what am I afraid of?
I rarely think about this. I more think of what I *want* and then worry about not getting it. But, I can reverse engineer my fear from that, can’t I?
I want to be liked, which means I’m afraid of not being liked.
I can remember the sting of being made fun of as a kid. It’s the same sting now. It makes my face feel hot and my throat get stopped up so I can’t speak. It makes my thoughts swirl so fast I can’t catch them.
I’m afraid of being stupid, or ignorant.
I can remember that too as a kid, feeling small and powerless. Kids on the bus talking about things I didn’t know and either keeping quiet and as invisible as possible or pretending to know and desperately afraid of being found out. But, never secure enough to just say I didn’t know.
I’m afraid of being weak; not seen as a man. I remember being picked on because I was too small to fight back or intimidate other kids to leave me alone. I remember being called skinny, and looking in the mirror and never seeing the body a man should have. I could never scare anyone; I was always the one scared.
I’m afraid of being alone, which is difficult to untangle since I’ve often coped with that fear by CHOOSING to be alone. I did that a lot as a kid, playing by myself. That wasn’t a choice. The early years of my life before brothers and before school I spent a lot of time on my own because we lived rather far away from my preschool or any other social group of similarly-aged kids. My mom was never a social butterfly, per se. I learned to play on my own very early. It’s a strength of mine, but in the middle of that mixed in as well is loneliness and social anxiety.
I’m afraid of failure in general. So afraid of it that I almost never think of it directly. I’m always thinking of how to avoid it. It made me a rather rubbish actor in many ways, most specifically with improv.
The result of any of the above fears, and I’m sure there are more that will come to me as I continue to think about all this…is shame. Intense shame. Shame that makes me want to disappear, to not exist. I’m terrified of that shame, and I’ve developed A LOT of behaviors to avoid it.
I’m afraid of being ashamed.