Do you have experience of being unable to cope with overwhelming anxiety or fear and don't know why?
Yes, I have felt fear ... but I also believe in the truth of something that Mark Twain once said. "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear." ~Mark Twain,
Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, 1894
I was bullied a lot as a kid. My father made me wear leg braces as a toddler because he said I was clumsy and that I was "pigeon footed" when I stood. The braces were used to straighten my feet. I do not understand how they were supposed to have helped with my clumsiness.
Since I wore the leg braces during the important transition period between learning how to walk and learning how to run, I missed a milestone in my physical development ... and when the leg braces finally came off, there was no physical therapy to show me how to run.
I did not learn how to run until I was ten ... so as you might expect, the other kids shunned me and only reluctantly chose me for their teams during P.E. because I was the last kid left.
I was a nerdy kid with awkward social skills ... an easy target for bullies who would take my lunch money, tear up my homework, shove my head into a urinal, and make fun of me in the hallways. Believe it or not, all of these experiences occurred in private schools abroad. My father was a doctor as well as an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, so I grew up in Ghana, Thailand, and El Salvador.
I didn't attend a public high school until I was in the 11th grade. My father had just been transferred from El Salvador back to the U.S. and he had been posted to Atlanta, Georgia. It was 1977, just 14 years since that state had repealed the last of its Jim Crow laws. For those of you not familiar with the old South, the Jim Crow laws were a southern response to the emancipation of slaves during the U.S. Civil War. The laws provided for "separate but equal" facilities ... so that "colored" people had their own stores and neighborhoods and schools while the white folk had their stores and neighborhoods and schools.
Although desegregation had become the law of the land, the south was still segregated in '77. The Jim Crow laws had created neighborhoods for "colored" people and neighborhoods for white people - so when desegregation was finally adopted, school zones reflected the division of neighborhoods by ethnic lines. Inner city Atlanta was where most of the minorities lived while affluent whites lived in the suburbs.
My father bought a home from a "block buster," a realtor who sold a home in a white neighborhood to my parents at an inflated price.
The death threats came soon after. People with a distinctive southern drawl would call and tell us to go back to China. Unkind things were painted on our garage door. It was a stressful time made worse by the fact that I had to attend what had been an almost all white school.
I was one of two minorities at this school.
The kids in my junior class told me that I was okay for a chink because I talked white. The only other minority was an African American. The kids said he was okay for a n---- because he was on the football team.
Public high school was a miserable experience. As bad as the bullying was in the private schools, it was worse in the public schools. One bully in particular was a football player who amused himself by tormenting me. During P.E. he threw my clothes in the shower, forcing me to return to class wearing gym clothes to the amusement of the girls who promptly wolf whistled at me. I was so embarrassed that I asked my teacher if I could change and I wore soggy wet clothing for the rest of the day.
The bully was a large guy who was quite strong. He enjoyed grabbing me, lifting me off my feet, and slamming me into a wall. While his cronies laughed, he'd slap me - demanding that I "ching-chong-chow" for him and speak Chinese. Since I am a 3rd generation U.S. citizen who was not raised in a Chinese community (not even Chinese American), I didn't speak Chinese at all ... but this didn't stop the bully from beating me up for not speaking "ching chong" to him like a trained parrot.
My life became a nightmare. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. The mere thought of having to go to school next day caused me to wet myself on more than one occasion.
I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to tell my parents because I had learned early on that my parents were rather intolerant of me. When I was young they used to slap me for spinning or flapping or violently shaking my head - so the lesson I learned at an early age was to not make a scene and not to attract attention to myself at home.
One day while I was moping around the house, I found myself in the basement and in an unmarked cardboard box hidden behind a pile of junk that my mother couldn't bring herself to throw away, I found a 22 caliber pistol made by Savage Firearms.
Without really thinking about what I was doing, I took the pistol to school the next day. When the bully spotted me, I ran for the bathroom knowing that he would follow me. I was waiting for him when he barged into the boys' room. I had the pistol in my hand pointed at him and he skidded to a stop when he saw it.
I could have pulled the trigger. Part of me WANTED to pull the trigger. A dark part of me whispered that I could kill the bully and then go after everyone at the school who had ever laughed at me or called me a goddamned chink or who had condescendingly assured me that someday, the South would RISE AGAIN!
Twenty two years before the slaughter at Columbine, I could have killed this bully ... but I chose not to. The bully gaped at me. His mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping for air. I reveled in the power of having a weapon ... of having this bully's life in my hand. I walked up to him and viciously kicked him in the family jewels and after he was on the floor, I kicked him a couple of times more because I really wanted to kill him and I was pretty certain that I was going to get in trouble for this anyway.
And sure enough, a crony had called for a teacher and my favorite teacher at the school, a sociology instructor stepped into the boys' bathroom, put out her hand, and demanded that I give her the weapon. I gave her the weapon and meekly followed her to the principal's office.
There was a crowd of students in the hallway and they quietly parted to let us past. For the first time that school year, no one called me a chink or a chinaman. No one told me to go back to China. The students seemed to know that something vicious and ugly had happened in that bathroom.
Surprisingly enough, I was not arrested. I was not even expelled. It turned out that the school administration had known about some of the problems I had faced but they hadn't known the extent of the bullying. I should at least have received a suspension but nothing happened. They even returned the weapon to me after removing the bullets because I told them that my father would be really upset if he found his weapon missing.
To this day, I do not understand why the building administration didn't really do anything about what had happened other than to sweep the events under the rug.
The bully and his cronies left me alone after that. EVERYONE left me alone. I finished my junior year and since I had so many credits from the private schools I had attended, I took senior English over the summer and graduated before the 1977-1978 school year had even begun. I did not attend graduation and after leaving Georgia to attend college, I never returned to that state.
The fear I had faced and overcome (despite the dangerous and unconventional means) was the first step I took towards learning how to deal with fear in general. Mark Twain was right. Courage is not the absence of fear ... it's the ability to act DESPITE your fear.
I was an elementary teacher in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War. I was there during Operation Desert Shield while allied forces were assembled on the Saudi border with Kuwait. I was also there during Operation Desert Storm when these very same forces were unleashed against the Iraqis who had occupied Kuwait.
In retaliation for these attacks, the Iraqis launched scud missiles at Dhahran. Dhahran was the corporate headquarters of the Saudi Aramco Oil Company. A huge allied airbase had been built just outside Dhahran and an even larger supply depot had also been built. Given the inefficiency of the Iraqi scud missiles, choosing Dhahran as a target was probably a no-brainer for the the Iraqi military. After all, if they fired enough missiles at us, they were bound to hit something, right?
And so at intermittent periods throughout the early days of Desert Storm, the civil defense sirens would wail and we'd grab our company issued poison gas masks and run for shelter. As a third grade teacher, I hated the scud missile alerts because my kids were terrified. Corporate policy said we had to duck and cover under our desks but in the silence that followed the wail of the missile alerts, some of the kids would always cry ... so I'd pull out a dog eared copy of John Erickson's Hank the Cowdog book and I'd wander up and down the rows between desks reading this book while we waited for the all clear siren.
Unwilling to give into my fear of Iraqi scud missiles, I stopped ducking into my "shelter" in the closet under the stairs leading to my bedroom Instead of cowering in a shelter, I opened the bedroom window, climbed onto the window and looked to see if I could spot the in-coming missiles.
In retrospect I wished I had thought to take a camera. Dhahran was ringed by Patriot missile batteries and on one occasion I saw the fiery trail of a Patriot rising into the air where it hit a distant scud missile.
After the war ended and things began to settle down in Saudi Arabia, I made another conscious effort to face my fears by buying a car. The Saudis allowed expats to drive in their country provided they had a driver's license (from their birth country) and were not women. It was (and remains) illegal for women to drive in Saudi Arabia.
Driving was challenging because the Saudis consider traffic regulations to be optional.
Case in point ... you're coming to a 4 way stop. What do you do? In most countries you'd stop and when it was your turn to go, you'd go. The Saudis have a different spin on this that works like this. Whoever has the larger vehicle and more momentum has the right of way.
The first time I ever came to a 4 way stop, I stopped and because I had no momentum I was there for nearly 30 minutes before the traffic eased up enough for me to go. After that, I learned to gauge the traffic. Since I drove a Jeep Cherokee, I'd only brake for buses, trucks, and Suburbans. It was really quite amusing to host new hires who were fresh from the states. Many of them gulped in terror when I ran a 4 way stop blaring my horn while casually talking as though nothing unusual was happening ... because the reality was that nothing unusual WAS happening. We were after all in Saudi Arabia and U.S. cultural norms (and traffic laws) did not apply.
A few years after returning stateside, I decided to join a volunteer fire department so that I could face my fear of fire. I learned how to don bunker gear and how to wear an oxygen mask and airpack. The fire department taught me how to be an assistant nozzleman (the guy bracing the guy with the nozzle to the hose). I learned how to participate in smoke filled search and clear operations and how to fight a fire. While civilians evacuated burning buildings in rightful terror, I learned how to advance into a burning building with my team to hit that fire before flashover occurred ... a dangerous period in which the interior heat was so intense that walls and furnishings could simply ignite.
Since I had a fear of heights, I once volunteered to climb onto the roof of a burning building to ventilate the roof with an ax. In retrospect this was not a very bright move because it was winter and the roof was slippery with ice. To further combat my fear of heights, I once went bungee jumping off a bridge at the foot of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. That was not a pleasant experience and having made the mistake of jumping just after lunch, I gifted the rocks below with a partially digested meal of ostrich stroganoff. The good news was that since I was hanging upside down, there wasn't any back splatter on my clothing. The bad news is that I probably reeked when they pulled me up.
I still have other fears. I don't like clowns because their painted facial expressions are a grotesque distortion of real life. I'm not sure of what I could do to get over this unreasoning fear. I'm sane enough to realize that shooting a clown would not be a legal option ... not that I own a firearm because I don't.
I also hate tarantulas. When I was six years old, I once woke up in Thailand to find a tarantula slowly crawling up the bed sheets towards my face. I screamed for help and when my father came rushing in, he rather callously stood there laughing at me and telling me to "man up" and stop acting like a girl. He waited until the creepy crawler was within INCHES of my face before plucking it off.
I doubt if I will ever conquer all of my fears ... but it's enough for me that I've looked most of them in the face and have metaphorically spit in fear's eye.
The key thing in overcoming fear is to do something. Anything. To submit to fear is to surrender your autonomy and to give up what is allegedly God's greatest gift to us ... free will.
Sorry for the long post. The hour draws late in Nevada and I must be off to bed.
Be well!
David
P.S. Pictured below is a picture of yours truly from 1991. It was "Middle Eastern Day" and 3rd grade teachers and students dressed in Arabic clothing to celebrate our study of Saudi culture. It was pretty interesting. The company put up a Bedouin tent for each class and catered a variety of Arabic food ... chicken schwarmas, falafel, hummus with pita bread, and baklava.
It's hard to believe that I was ever so young or skinny. (sigh)
Anxiety can get the best of me, too. May you find just what helps ease things for you, my friend.
