Mark McNease

The realization that many of the decisions we make throughout our lives are made from fear can be startling. Fear often determines the choices that shape our dreams and create our personal environments. When we’re children, we fear displeasing the adults in our lives, especially our parents. We watch them for signs of disapproval, and we become conditioned to pleasing them. Many times we succeed, and sometimes we fail. And it is the fear of failure, of not getting their approval or, worse, incurring their judgement, that sets a tone for our reactions to others, sometimes for the rest of our lives. I still recognize this impulse in myself in relationships, from the most intimate to the most casual. I tell a joke and watch to see if the person I’d told it to thought it was funny. Or I disparage someone who’d annoyed me, and I wait to see if my criticism is shared or if I should soften it with some kind of praise. Watching for the reactions of others is a lifelong human trait, and one of the things we watch for most is any reason to fear. Do they like me? Did they enjoy my book? Do they think I’m good at what I do? Or—and here comes the fear—do they think I’m a fakir, do they mock me when I’ve left the room, can they see the real me, for surely they won’t like it.

Fear wears many masks and offers many faces: the face of anger, insisting we have been wronged somehow or that we’ve lost the upper hand; the face of sorrow, immersed in the fear that we will never feel pleasure again; the face of gloom, our expressions set by the conclusion that the world we believed we lived in—our personal world, the world of our community and nation, even the planet—is changing for the worse. Fear undergirds it all. Fear is there beneath the surface, and if we’re willing to patiently scrape away those layers of anger, resentment, jealousy, insecurity, judgement, indignation, warpaint, we will find fear, the flame that provides the heat for it all.