week 39
The Wall of Fear Effect
I was listening to Martha Beck’s Gathering Room podcast, when I came to an episode about creating senses of safety so that we can venture out and do hard things with bravery (listen to “The Secret to Safety” episode).
“Do something that scares you everyday,” is her motto, which I find easy to like but hard to live by. But I think it’s extra hard for those of us who have been plagued by a lot of anxiety. (I also finally watched Inside Out 2 this week, which I adore and definitely will be one of the many who adopt the cute little Anxiety creature as a mascot for my own anxiety). Martha Beck understands anxiety. Her alternative to feeling safe, is being brave. “Safety is something you feel, brave is something you do.”
“So most of the day, do what helps you feel safe because you need that. You can’t always be out there facing your demons. You need to rest a lot. But every day, do at least one thing that requires you to be brave. And actually, when people start doing it, there’s something I call the wall of fear effect, and that is, when you first start doing what you’re afraid to do, the things that you fear actually come up a lot… Being brave at first, you hit your wall of fear and the stuff you were afraid might happen happens. You do something that’s not well received… And it’s so unfamiliar to act brave. And then you see this negative reinforcement and you’re like, ‘Well, that was stupid. I’m never going to be brave again. I’m going to do what makes me feel safe. I’m not going to do anything that makes me be brave.’”
I’m brought back to so many moments where this was the case. But I will write about one this week, one that has haunted me since I was fifteen.
I was going to have my Freestyle 5 figure skating test, and then a solo audition for the ice show. I was going to skate to “The Phantom of the Opera.” The song felt powerful, just how I wanted to feel when I landed my hard-earned axel and passed to Freestyle 6, and then do it for a second time to earn my place as a soloist in the show.
Well, I didn’t land my axel. I fell, and then I landed it but three-turned out of the landing. I didn’t pass. But worse than not passing was the stern lecture I got from the testing coach.
“You skate way too slow! You have to take chances on the ice and off of it. You will never see one of my skaters skate as slow as you do into an axel. And you will take some falls, but that’s the price you pay for skating well.”
It’s paraphrased, but I’m not doing it justice. The tone was harsh, berating, and in front of my dad and the general public. It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. The advice was not unsound, but I had just worked up my courage over the past few weeks to give it my all to even land an axel— the only real skating jump with a forward take-off and the first real beast you face in skating. I did need to skate faster into it. But I also needed encouragement, not belittling. For years I’d continue to beat up on myself, not just for skating slowly and carefully but for living slowly and carefully, and for crumbling after she scolded me instead of being determined to grow. But when all you’ve known is being beaten down, it’s pretty damn hard to muster the courage to go for it again.
That was only part one of the nightmare. Then, an hour later, after running to the car to cry my eyes out… I had to skate the whole program again to see if I could earn a solo position. I fell not only on the axel but on jumps I could do in my sleep. It was the worst performance I had ever given in front of people doing anything (and I hope still the worst). I had two back-to-back experiences of forcing myself out of my comfort zone and getting a face slap of negative reinforcement. Back into my comfort zone I went.
There have been many moments like these in my life, some of which less traumatizing. The ones I took the hardest were the teachers and coaches who took the “tough love” approach, probably not realizing that I was harder on myself than they ever could be, and would intellectually get their point but emotionally take the exact wrong message to heart. The English teacher who told my parents I could have done better on his test if I took it with my eyes closed, the band teacher who mocked me and said I wouldn’t get far in life if I kept standing in the back and shying away from things, the screenwriting coach who knocked my confidence on a good-but-not-yet-great script. I could go on and on. I’ve wanted to “show them,” even when years and years have passed and their opinions no longer have any relevance in my life. But their voices are the demons I must face, because their echoes are the ones whose negative reinforcement keeps holding me back as I can’t help but remember how awful the consequences were for being brave.
“This is why you have to aim your brave acts toward things you really yearn for with your whole heart and soul…” says Martha. “And then you’ll notice that when you keep going back and you keep going back, and the bad things keep happening, it’s less interesting. You’re less impressed by it, because you know you’re just going to do it again.”
I suppose that this is the whole point of my failing project, after all.