Mark McNease

If you spend much time watching television or browsing the Internet, you’ll quickly realize what advertisers have been telling us all our lives: that there is something wrong with us. Vast fortunes are made by people convincing us we’re naturally defective and the best way to repair our damaged selves, if they can be repaired at all, is by using whatever product they’re selling. Hair loss? They’ve got the cure. Overweight? Try one of dozens of programs, apps and plans guaranteed to slim us down and give us a fighting chance of at least liking ourselves, if love is too much to hope for.

We’re told so often, for so long, that something is wrong with us that we internalize it early in life. Good, supportive parenting is to be admired and encouraged, but it’s often the exception to the rule. Too many parents discourage their children’s curiosity and self-expression, choosing to limit them instead, often because they’d been limited themselves. We grow up being much more familiar with don’t, can’t, won’t, than we are with do, can, will, or try. Too many parents see their children as extensions of themselves, including their own disappointments and unmet expectations. They want sons to play sports, girls to keep flower-covered diaries. They seek to create only slightly altered versions of themselves in the adults their children grow up to be.

Mark McNease

Our bodies are often the first to tell us when something isn’t right, when something needs attention. They begin speaking to us almost as soon as we find ourselves in this strange environment we call our lives: they tell us we must breathe within moments after emerging from the womb; they tell us we must rid ourselves of waste, first with the abandonment of an infant, and later with the control we’re taught and that eventually determines much of how we function in the world. Our bodies tell us when change is upon us, in stages that can be as frightening as adolescence, or as sudden as a broken bone, or as marvelous as a first sexual response.

Our bodies are constantly speaking to us. Unfortunately, we often refuse to listen, believing we know better than our bodies, or being unable to understand what they’re telling us, or simply denying the truths they speak. Bodies are wild and natural, and taming them sometimes comes with a very high price. But we can begin to hear what they tell us, and by taking their advice we can live a freer, easier existence less burdened by pain and uncertainty.

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.