Fear

About writing: two months ago I decided to stop all work on Pilgrims Dream, and I'm nervous about jumping back in.  It feels like the right time, various cycles have come together in this moment, and after about nine months I finally have my lucky fountain pen back in working order.

So what is it that lurks in this hesitation?

I have a lot of fears tied up in writing.  Fear of failure.  I'm not sure, but maybe fear of success also.  Fear that my talent and ability don't match my ambition.  Fear that I don't have the skill to communicate what I believe is worth expressing.  Fear that I am not who I hope to be.

My laziness terrifies me.  I fit the slacker role well enough, and I even embrace it, but for this desire.  I want to be admired and respected for my writing, and yet it's been almost a decade since I completed anything for serious publication.  I want to be admired for something I've yet to achieve.  I want to be someone who I am not.

Since I am not yet the person I hope to be, I fear that I don't allow myself, in the present, to connect to the people around me.  Maybe I want everyone to connect to the person who I am not, and I think of myself as a temporary mistake, so I keep everyone at a distance, for now at least, waiting for the day when they can connect to the person who I want to be.  And maybe that day will never come, and maybe I will never have a true human relationship.

I'm terrified that my life is drifting wreckage and without purpose.  Last night in conversation I said, "I have no long term plans."  And then I added, "I used to."  I think of Prospero, who recognized the moment of his fate, who saw the star his destiny hung upon, and I wonder if I've already missed my star.  Who knows what might've distracted me.

I fear that I'm petty and misguided for all of this, that I'm terribly flawed, that this need for my work to be admired--work I sometimes think I might never complete anyway--that my entire personality is founded on a mistake, a wrong intention.  I should want to be happy, I should want to love, I should want to create, and none of those right intentions would give rise to all these fears.  I must be doing something wrong.

In the last two weeks, two people have told me, in unrelated contexts, that it's crucial to confront your fears.  I hope that's what I'm doing now.  I'm not done yet.

My ambition terrifies me.  I want to create something great, brilliant and true, with a strong heart and a clear mind, something rare and therefore maybe impossible, or at least beyond my reach.  I fear that my ambition far outstrips my potential, and that I in turn use this as an excuse.  If I've inflated my ambition to the impossible, then I will always count myself as a failure.  If I will always be a failure in my own eyes, I have the perfect justification for laziness.  But it's one thing to never feel success and another to never give it a shot.

What is failure?  What is success?  Why do I care about these words?

What will I be when I am old?  I see a man alone who once dreamed of writing something great but never accomplished it, even as he let that dream justify a life half-lived.  Shouldn't I have a long term plan?  Shouldn't I be making moves today to secure a better future?  I tell myself I only need fiction to be happy, and that anyway I've found myself in a fantastic situation, a place maybe others would dream about--I love this here and now, living in Prague--and thus I let my life, my future, go down the drain.

I don't know if I'm deluding myself further with this entry, if what I'd like to think of as courageously hunting down my personal demons is in fact only a pose--that it's only something I believe a writer should do.  Maybe I am imitating the person I would like to be instead of being myself.  Maybe everything I am is a farce.  Maybe I don't even know myself, and if that's true, how could I ever find anything worthy of communication?

I've been here before, so I've seen what doubt can do to me.  But how can I know when it is too much, and when it isn't enough?

I have felt destiny and magic in my life.  I watch for signs and allow myself to be led by them.  I seek them.  I wrote earlier about the two people who spoke to me about facing fears--I attribute a mystical force and purpose to such coincidences.  Life feels empty and dead to me when I don't see these signs.  But maybe a coincidence is nothing more than a coincidence.  Maybe I've turned my attention and intelligence to this charmed, spooky fantasy world because I don't have the necessary rigor of focus to discern reality.  Or maybe these signs are real but not sympathetic to my purposes.  Maybe these signs are meant to misdirect me.  I used to do the rational thing, and since then I've been doing the intuitive, imaginative thing--it seems I'm capable of getting lost no matter which compass I hold.

A thought just came to me.

(The fly from the fly-bottle.)

I specifically remembered the story of the Egyptian goddess Isis: her husband had been murdered, and she didn't have the power to restore him.  So Isis tricked Ra, the more powerful god, into revealing his secret name to her.  By possessing that secret name, that word, Isis gained control over Ra's power, and she then used it to resurrect her husband.

It is the word that holds the power.  It is the word that brings life from death.  It is the word that conquers.

I have named my fear.