Tumbling down the rabbit hole of fear

Why do you stay in prison … when the door is so wide open? - Rumi

Sometimes I wake up in the morning filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. I’ve always been a sensitive absorber of the world around me but at times this experience feels out of control. Is it just me or is fear everywhere? Spiralling living costs, war, recession, extinction. Perhaps it is the fires, floods and storms that are increasing in intensity and frequency. Perhaps it is the sensationalism of the news cycle. Perhaps I just don’t watch enough cat videos.  Or have the media, scientists, activists and movements alike all finally agreed on something - that this paradise will become a bleak wasteland decimated by violence, disaster and famine?

I must admit, this terrifying vision of the future not only lives firmly inside me, but I have been a vocal exponent of it. Fear of a world I don't want has, until recently, been my primary source of intrinsic motivation. This world view was carefully cultivated over a decade of work in social movements, activism and building alternatives. This fear has driven me to put my work above all else in my life. It has filled me with a sense of importance, with urgency. It made me feel justified in workaholism, arrogance, even rudeness and callousness. I have harboured anger at people who I decided were not doing enough. I have been upset and angry at myself because I could not feel like I was possibly doing enough. With hindsight, I can see that fear is a terrible motivator.

The world is always ending
… and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck. -  Neil Gaimen

Fear might be a terrible motivator, but it is an incredibly powerful emotion. Looking around it is everywhere. It manifests as overwhelm and denial. As fight, flight, freeze. Anything to avoid feeling uncomfortably vulnerable. Fear becomes a Twitter argument. It becomes a war. Fear strives to escape - to Mars or into a computer. It can hide behind a Netflix binge, a package holiday. It lives beneath just one more drink, one more hit. It manifests as a wall between countries, deportation flights and derogatory slurs. For some it is overwhelming and disabling, rendering change impossible leaving only the same path they’ve always followed. Fear is fast, reactive, urgent. It seems to me that building a world that we want to live in cannot possibly come from a place of fear. 

Faced with this vision of the future and the resultant fear it generates it’s no wonder that progressive circles are ripe with calls to harness our collective creativity and practise imagining the world we want to see. From Rebecca Solnit’s call to address our storytelling crisis, Rob Hopkins ‘From what is to what if’, Phoebe Tickell’s Moral Imaginations, to Mary Helger telling us the world ‘desperately needs more artists’ - there is no shortage of rhetoric calling us to action on a different imaginative adventure story. All of this work resonates deeply with my decision to stop working on systems change from a place of fear and instead work from a place of creating art. Very quickly I learned art does not live in the rush to do the next most important world changing action. To become an artist I need to stop, turn around, and meet the fear that I have been running from.

Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?

Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear
… but it’s also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. - Brene Brown

When I first stepped from the edge three years ago I was not prepared for just how deep this rabbit hole can go. I’d been working in what I’d hoped would become an influential role in a think tank. Instead, my sensitive soul absorbed that world like a sponge in a cesspit. Chasing an idea of what I thought was important made me physically sick and miserable. When I quit that job I also quit an idea of what my future looked like, what I thought success looked like. I decided that success didn’t look like power, it looked like joy, and I found myself somewhat appalled by the realisation I had no idea what was joyful to me. The pursuit of joy took me into drawing classes, dance classes, martial arts, protests, meditation, tantra, cooking, acting, improv. Following my gut I embarked on a year long acting training with the wonderful Law Ballard in the Meisner Technique - acting training designed to find your emotional blocks and liberate them so the actor can live fully in the imaginary experience of the scene. And here I found the next layer - fear cloaked in shame.

Before then I had no idea that opening to joy meant opening to all emotions. In order to feel joy you need to also be able to feel grief, sadness, pain and sorrow. Going into a training designed to find and unblock emotions felt more like hacking through an armour I didn’t know I was wearing with a chisel and a chainsaw. 35 years of emotions repressed by fear and shame - inadequacy, invisibility, shame, rejection, isolation - all bubbled to the surface. I started to meet the demonised versions of myself that plagued my subconscious. A terrified six year old version of myself hiding in a cave. A vulgar, hagged image of myself as a young teen. I started to welcome them home.

As I found a deep compassion for wounded parts of myself, I began to be able to meet the scared and wounded parts in other people. Enemies transformed into beautiful people carrying demons. Beautiful people burdened by demons passed on to us by people with their own demons. Demons blocking love, vulnerability and compassion hatched each time we weren’t seen, weren’t met, weren’t loved. Unmet parts of self, demonised and projected onto others, passed from generation to generation. A whole society held under guard by the demons of our own creations. But despite our demons we are all beautiful. Every single one of us. Only by meeting this within myself was I able to meet it in others. So many of my fears evaporated. I began to feel so much lighter. Alas, the rabbit hole was not done with me yet.

My foray into acting took a sharp detour when COVID shut down the first show I was cast in, and, of course, every other performance for every other artist in the world. Lunged back into food systems COVID response my soul was not impressed, and visions and dreams bombarded me. You are an artist, I would hear whispers in my ear. As the pull became stronger the demons returned. I started to explore making music. I took singing lessons and for a year I cried through every lesson. For months, even in an empty house, I would hear shouts from afar screaming at me to shut up. Voices so real that I would stop, listen, sometimes check in with the neighbours. These voices were only in my head. I’d hear violent screaming demanding I stop. I’d hear hissing voices in my head telling me they’d kill me if I made a sound. I’d feel huge, heavy ropes around my neck pulling and tightening, constricting my breath and my voice. These were demons of a different magnitude. These demons weren’t from my lifetime. They have been festering in the landscape for hundreds of years and I could feel them clinging to my wounds.

As I’ve met more people working on their creative transformation I’ve met more and more stories like this. I’ve heard of a Victorian washerwoman grabbing someone's hair to stop them performing. I’ve heard of a deceased grandpa poking someone in their diaphragm saying emotions are not welcome because we are at war. The fears that live inside us are real, they are big, and they have been growing and multiplying alongside us for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They hold us back, stifle our expression, prevent us from standing out, being different. They pull us apart from each other, hold our heads in the sand and make sure we are perpetually ready to attack each other. No wonder it is so difficult to come together to transform this world.

Why do you stay in prison
… when the door is so wide open? - Rumi

Meeting these demons is not easy, but perhaps it is the only task we have to do in these times. This world desperately needs us to be the artists, storytellers and creators of a regenerative world. It is time to unveil our magnificent humanity. We were all born as pure creative expression, but most of us are lying in hiding. Conforming. As artists we are the sensitive people, the ones that feel the entirety of our emotions - so subtle we can feel the trees talk, and so huge they reveal the secrets of mountains. For me, uncovering a lifetime of repressed emotions was so overwhelming that I had to shut myself off from the entire world for days, weeks at a time. I consider it a privilege that I found a point in my life in which I was able to do this.

Art comes from the opposite place of fear - a fearless exposure of oneself to the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, in many ways the art world reflects who feels safe in our society. In the UK somewhere between 8 and 16% of creative professionals come from working class backgrounds, and this number is even smaller for working class women or those from marginalised groups. For many of us, our early life felt so unsafe to exist that we attacked ourselves out of existence. For those of us without a safety net, it was doubly unsafe. I felt as though the world told me that not only was my emotional intensity unwelcome, but that an expressive life would be resigned to poverty. Political instability and erratic living costs amplify feelings of a lack of safety. And it is exactly this safety that is required to break down into little pieces, filter out the demons and find the subtle gifts of expression that lie beneath. And exactly this safety that will erode if the social fabric unravels.

The world needs artists, now more than ever, to tell the stories of a new world. Stories that can resonate with everyone. Stories that can pave a way through the murky underbelly of thousands of years of domination culture. Perhaps, our job, as people who have tumbled down the rabbit hole of fear and shame to find the wonders of the other side, is to make it as safe as possible for as many other people to do the same? It’s a nice question to hold - how can I make it safer for others to be vulnerable?

I hope that for me, one way is my words. So maybe someone needs to hear it - healing is difficult. It will kick you in the ass and break you into a thousand pieces. Don’t resist. Don’t fight the darkness. Lean into what you are offered because you are strong enough for it. It will happen when you are ready for it and not before. Listen. With compassion. To yourself, and every other being. This healing is all we need to do. Do this and all the rest - the fear, the shame, the joy, the revolution, all of it - will take care of itself.

‘Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn the piano?’
‘The same age you’ll be if you don’t’. 
- Julia Cameron in the Artist’s Way