Fear Factory

I am trying to learn something new at the moment. I am finding it insanely hard to do. Some of this is because what I am trying to learn is hard. A lot of it is because of the way that I learn new things. I have been coming face to face with some of my demons and it’s no fun at all. I am exhausted, stressed beyond reason and very, very angry at myself.

I have attempted to talk about this with people who love me and want to help. They are generous to a fault, kind, patient and entirely reasonable. I am not, which is one of the reasons I am so cross with myself. It’s causing a terrible noise in my head, which isn’t helping matters, but I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to stop any of it.

I know that there are some fundamental things at the bottom of all this. One is everything I learned about learning in childhood, the other is fear, which is what I learned about learning in childhood.

As a child I was permanently anxious. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t worried about fucking something up. I felt responsible for so many things. Things I couldn’t even articulate and didn’t understand, which was mostly everything. Things that were not my responsibility or my problem, but which I felt responsible for anyway. In my first weeks of school, the teacher told me off for saying ‘sorry’ too much. Everyone laughed. I burst into tears. Later I went to the birthday party of a child in my class. I didn’t understand the rules of the game we were playing and the rest of the kids laughed at me. I burst into tears. The pattern began. I fine tuned it in later life by waiting until I was in private to burst into tears. Otherwise we’re pretty much still stuck in being age four as far as learning goes.

I couldn’t understand why everyone else was so casual about stuff when the world was such a troubling, confusing place with danger around every corner and I couldn’t save them or myself. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid that the Yorkshire Ripper would kill my mum. I was afraid to go to the next birthday party. For me, they were pretty much on a par for a long time. I didn’t understand how to put things in proportion. I didn’t know how to de-escalate fear. I just felt it. I learned to hate school pretty quickly, because it was where the worst moments of panic lived. I don't remember actively enjoying it until I was in sixth form. Then I had a nervous breakdown and hardly went, so that was short lived.

I say this as if the entire first eighteen years of my life can be summarised in a couple of sweeping paragraphs. Clearly it can’t, and there were days when life was terrific, but even on the good days, fear ran underneath like a live rail.

I was a sickly kid but I definitely exaggerated some of the stuff that was wrong with me so that I could have extra time off. Home had its own complications but at least there, nobody shouted maths problems at me or forced me to learn stuff at a heightened pitch of sheer terror. Some of the illnesses were real, but in hindsight, often brought about by anxiety and stress. I was bullied fairly regularly and the rest of the time I bullied myself. I always believed the problem was me. Sometimes I still do. It’s a hard habit to break.

This hot housing of terror and anxiety in a hostile school environment has meant that even into adulthood I have found learning new things really, really hard. At school I coped by developing a brutal interior dialogue and forcing myself to do the things that scared me, because failing other people scared me more. I learned to pretend to cope and frantically worked to hide and then fill all the gaps in secret. I did this with everything from learning algebra to getting and keeping jobs in later life.

It took me a year after graduating to get a job. In that year I applied for hundreds of jobs. Every time I applied for something and didn’t get it, there was someone around to tell me exactly how I had fucked up. My CV was too sparse or too detailed. I wasn’t casual enough for casual work. I didn’t have enough experience for regular work. I was being too picky. I wasn’t being picky enough. There was always a reason why it was my fault. Everyone called it learning, but it felt a lot like bullying.

I got better at jobs just like I’d got better at school. I’d bully myself into working harder until I figured things out. In the end I learned to use my fear like rocket fuel. I have done countless jobs in my time, some great, some so horrific that I still have unresolved trauma. I have never had a job where I have not started it in terror. I have never had a job I didn’t learn to do better through being awful to myself. I’ve had a few jobs where I have been brutalised by other people in ways that made school bullies look like the rank amateurs they were.

It’s not just jobs. I even learned to drive this way. I was so horrible to myself learning to crochet that I had to stop going to the class that I had booked as a treat, because I couldn’t let myself learn it kindly.

The only learning experiences I have ever had that weren’t rooted in fear were learning to read and write. Those things made sense to me. Stories have always been my comfort. Stories have been the only consistent things in my life that have ever taught me without judgment and given me maps into monstrous territory beyond my understanding.

I was talking about this, incoherently, with someone a few days ago. They said that they couldn’t understand where I was coming from, because I was so clever at so many things. They said that the things I couldn’t do didn’t matter, but that the things I could do were so amazing, they more than made up for the gaps. They said they would help me with the things I couldn’t do. Not to worry.

I know that I have some mad skills. There is some truly bonkers stuff that I can do that lots of people can’t. There’s also a lot of stuff that I never thought I could do in a million years that I have mastered. I know that often, the things that make me sweat with fear are things that other people can just do and there will be no shortage of people to either do them for me, or teach me. I also know that no matter what anyone says, I am never going to be able to tell left from right or do long division. I know that my fear drowns out my ability.

I know all that.

I do not know how not to worry.

And fear is far, far bigger than worry. Fear is primal and hard to conquer, because fear protects us from tigers and dangerous men. Fear protects us from putting our hands in threshing machines. And fear is old. Old as the hills. Older even. We first drew breath with fear and it kept us alive. Fear doesn’t know that times have changed. Fear doesn’t know the difference between the Yorkshire Ripper and a child’s birthday party. Fear just is. And I have lived with it for so long. And the one thing I have never learned is how not to be afraid.