Fear and What to Do About It

When we were in France over the summer, Étienne, the man we stay with in the south, asked me if I was afraid. I had just told me about my work in Chicago; I had given him the Al Capone-laden spiel I developed specifically for French people, but he ignored all that and focused on what I had said about working in North Lawndale. "Are you afraid?" he asked, in French of course, and at first I wasn't quite sure how to respond.

No Americans I know would have asked me that question. Even Americans from Étienne's generation, who with age have become more nervous and wary, always greet my work explanation with an interested, "Oh. That's quite something," or a vague, "Well, good luck," or an admiring, "What a wonderful thing you're doing." I've had people ask me if I'm excited. Indeed, they mostly ask without asking: "You must be so excited!" they exclaim, as if they're informing me. You must be so excited. If not, what?

Very few people have even gone so far as to acknowledge that I might be nervous. My parents know I'm nervous; they know my face, after all, and, as Roommate J once told me, to the people who know how to read me I'm not so much an open book as a hefty tome. So my parents know, but very few others do. I'm sure all the Fellows were nervous before they started, but you won't catch them talking about it at the mixers where we're supposed to put on a professional demeanor and you won't catch them talking about it in bars where we're supposed to be impressing each other. Everyone is supposed to be so excited all the time. Sometimes they're allowed to, and, indeed, expected to be, completely stressed out.

Rarely nervous, never afraid.

I will be driving to work instead of taking public transportation. My hours are such that I would frequently be leaving after dark, and the walk to the El would have taken my half a mile through the neighborhood and under an underpass. My parents were generous enough to let me borrow/have the car, and I was fortunate enough to find housing with parking (for a fee). It was my mother's idea, but I hastily agreed. Étienne would doubtless see these logistics, this hasty agreement, as proof of my fear. Mere nervousness, he might well think, is not enough to drive someone to make alternative transportation logistics.

Maybe he's right. Certainly, right now, sitting here, typing this and thinking about this coming Monday my stomach is in knots. However it's difficult to separate all the nervous strands: the wish to do well at one's job and the worry that that won't happen, the still-a-little-vague terms of my employment and the completely unknown factor that is my boss, the fact that I've had this apartment for almost a month now and still haven't gotten a paycheck to help me out, the thought (irrational or not) that I might not make a very good teacher, the clothes, the traffic, the drive.

Yes. I admit it. I'm afraid. But of what changes minute by minute, and sometimes there are whole hours when I'm not afraid of anything. I also know that mine is a luxurious fear, that when I finish up work I can retreat to my nice studio in Lincoln Park and that, while it is still an urban environment, it is nothing compared to the places my students will spend the night.

There is nothing special about my emotions. More people feel like this, I am absolutely sure, than they will admit. It is possible that in a week or a month I will look at this blog post and laugh and shake my head with the knowledge that I had nothing to worry about. I'm excited (I must be), but I'm also scared, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that, in and of itself. The problem arises when you let that fear affect what you do or don't do. You have to be on the lookout.

When I go to the dentist (not frightening in the least; merely uncomfortable), I like to pretend, while the dental hygienist is banging around in my mouth, that I am being tortured for information I will never give up under any circumstances. I pretend I'm a spy (shocking, I know) and my job and my life are on the line. Driving to work, I might pretend I'm Dido Twite, the heroine of Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles. She knows what she has to do and if she gets lost she brushes herself off and gets back on track. She finds kindred spirits in unexpected places. She always gets the job done. She doesn't really know what she wants to do with her life, but she follows the breadcrumbs from situation to situation and somehow winds up in the right place eventually.

I'm putting Dido Twite on my bookshelf alongside Mary Ann Singleton and George Smiley. She is the perfect role model. She doesn't let fear cloud her judgement, but she's not so foolish so as to pretend it doesn't exist.