I’m Scared of Everything and I Do It Anyway
Being an Anxious Chicken-Shit and Not Letting it Stop Me
Hi, my name is Maggie and I’m scared of everything. Here’s a list:
Rollercoasters
Spiders
Hair in the drain
Flying
Driving too fast
Driving in the rain
Other people driving
Other people driving too fast
Motorcycles
Large buses
Things with small holes, like lotus bulbs
Crowds
The dark
Putting my foot inside a shoe without checking it first for spiders
Checking my shoes for spiders
Tim Curry
See what I mean? You thought I was joking.
But give me an innocuous object, subject, or situation and I’ll turn it into a toe-curling nightmare and dwell on it for weeks, if not months, if not the rest of my natural life.
What the hell business does someone as fear-ridden as me have, travelling full-time and regularly sleeping in rooms whose spider content is both unknown and unassessable?!
REALLY GOOD FUCKING QUESTION, THANK YOU FOR ASKING.
If I had all the answers, I’d be less scared, more adventurous, and probably a very famous race car driver, because that was a dream of mine when I was a kid.
The ironic part (fear of using the word ‘ironic’ incorrectly, that’s another phobia of mine) is that I have a Diploma in Counselling.
I know, right? All the crazy ones are therapists! The two psychologists I know personally are so incontrovertibly off their rockers that it’s a wonder they’re not inhabiting padded cells. Instead, people put them in charge of making other people less crazy.
It beggars belief. It’s also one of the reasons I won’t get therapy. The other is that I’m afraid of therapists. And therapy. (You knew that was coming, you see how this works now, right?)
What I’ve never really suffered from, however, is fear of failure.
How on earth I managed to swerve by that one, in a world full of folks who are scared to death of failing, is beyond me.
We’ve all read the often-quoted fact (although I’ll admit, I haven’t done the research) that most people are more afraid of public speaking than dying, right? Well, I was on the debating team. In a past life, I was also involved in speaking to large audiences at massive tech conferences, wearing a microphone (who would give me a microphone, don’t you know how sweary I am?!) and telling people how to use Google Maps, before it was called Google Maps.
Getting up in front of people and talking shit, and potentially falling on my arse — both literally and metaphorically — are not things I’ve ever really been particularly afraid of.
Nervous? Yes. Slightly anxious that my hair looks silly? Yes. Worried a little that I might need the bathroom mid-lecture? I mean sure, isn’t that normal? My bowels have long been established as unreliable at best and mutinous at worst.
But scared? No.
Life is Terrifying and Then You Get Inoperable Cancer
Although I don’t have definitive answers, I do suspect a thing or two about this mysterious surplus of irrational fears and deficit of the regular ones.
The first is that I’m a writer. I launched my writing career with a book that detailed a series of escapades and adventures for which I was woefully underprepared but managed to survive. Not least of which were: smuggling my dad’s cremated ashes into South America, bribing border guards in Paraguay, and taking on the Great Ocean Walk in Australia with a pulled groin muscle and a bizarre leg-propelling sling that I’d fashioned from a bungee cord (patent pending).
It helps that being self-deprecating is a bit of an Aussie thing, and so, taking the absolute piss out of ourselves comes naturally to most of us. Thankfully, and to my eternal delight, that memoir was well-received. It bumped Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray Love off the Amazon top seller list, and I was up there in the Top Ten with the likes of Bill Bryson and Cheryl Strayed. (For all of two hours before it faded into obscurity, if I’m honest. But carve it on my headstone because it’s the crowning achievement of my life).
That book and its short-lived success gave me the delulu-level confidence to pursue a freelance writing career, quit my horrific day job, chuck in the towel on my abysmal marriage, and take off from Australia for a life of travel. And it reaffirmed in me that, if things go sideways, it’ll at least make great material for the next book. Or this newsletter. People love to read about hilariously stupid shit that happens to other people, after all, and I am happy to provide a laugh at my own expense.
Granted, in a Venn diagram where writers meet normal folk and the common denominator is fear, there might not be a lot of crossover. Stay with me, this next point is perhaps more relatable and universal.
The second theory I have for my mysterious and miraculous shortage of ‘normal people’ phobias is this: I’m far more afraid of dying with regrets than I am of trying and failing.
My dad died aged just 55. From cancer. It sucked, obviously. I mean, he smoked like an enthusiastic chimney from the age of twelve, and so exactly nobody was surprised. But that man was my hero. He was exactly the dad you imagine a dad to be when you’re little; strong, capable, super-humanly intelligent, the mechanic for the Batmobile (in retrospect I could have fact-checked his stories a little better, but these were the days before Google). He was the real-life incarnation of MacGyver — he could build working machines from spit and zip ties. He’d repair a car, a truck, or a boat like some kind of mad magician, with the wave of a hand and the frenzied delivery of several FUCKSHITFUCKS.
I learned early not to even try to assist by passing the man a wrench, for I would inevitably do it wrong. Better to just stand by and watch the wonder unfold.
But he couldn’t fix cancer. And honestly, that shattered me. On a conscious level, I knew it could happen. But when it did, I was flabbergasted.
And he still had DREAMS, people. When he retired, he was going to travel more, buy a narrowboat and pootle down the English waterways, get out and fish more often, take up competitive fencing (probably). He was only waiting until after he could retire to really live his life. And then it was over.
Pause for crying.
I know it’s de rigueur to use the death of a loved one to learn an important lesson. And the last thing I want to be is a cliche (petrified of that too). But from the moment my father shed that mortal coil, something in me shifted.
Every year I get closer to the age at which he died, and it’s as though a little clock thumps forebodingly inside me.
Tick, what are you doing with your life? Tock, your time is waning.
Imagine, I think to myself, that you only had fifteen years left?
People imagine all the time what they’d do if they only had a year to live because it’s a fun little thought experiment. But what if you really knew that you’d die at 40, or 50, or 60 years old? Would you spend your time differently? No really, would you be worried about looking silly at an open mic night, or would you regret that you never gave it a shot? Who knows, you could have been the next Dave Chapelle (for fuck’s sake don’t be the next Dave Chapelle, one is already too many).
Or would you be lying on your deathbed and clutching your chest saying, ‘Liza, I’m so glad I never took a vacation, worked all that overtime, and made Big Corporation that much richer. Now I’m here to croak it at the age of 66, one year after retirement, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Hand me the Financial Times, won’t you?’
You might. But you’d be one of the few, I think.
What Are You More Afraid Of? (Or: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway)
Fear is a natural human response to the idea of change. It’s what keeps us from taking a pickaxe to our next-door neighbour, Wallace, when he blasts Celine Dion at 5:30 AM while cleaning his drumkit. As much delirious, murdery joy as that might bring us in the moment, a couple of dimes in a supermax facility is not anyone’s idea of a good time. That’s a change we can do without. Cue: fear. Wallace lives to see (and belt out My Heart Will Go On) another day. This is, on measure, a good result. A win for the fear response.
But fear, I think, is also something that maintains, until our dying day, the farcical societal status quo of:
Putting ourselves into enormous debt for a university degree we’ve been told we need, but never wanted.
Working in the same shitty job for the same shitty bosses because without them, we’d lose our health insurance.
Staying married to a person we’re not happy with because what would life be like if we were alone?
Contributing to a system that is as likely to chew you up and spit you out as it is to support you, because it’s just the way things are.
Fear stops us from quitting our jobs and joining the circus. From taking up badminton with a dodgy hip. From starting a Substack newsletter. From retraining to become a kite-surfing instructor. From walking the PCT. From trying out curtain bangs even though you definitely have the face for it.
Living without fear is an impossibility, really. But letting it stop you short of going after the things you’re passionate about is not. Whether you’re passionate about knitting chest-hair sweaters for a post-modern art project you plan to showcase illegally outside the venue at Paris Fashion Week, or about writing murder mystery novels in which you can act out your wildest Wallace-slaying fantasies with giddy abandon and zero prison time, it’s never too late — until it really is too late.
You see the point I’m inelegantly trying to make here, right? Life is full of terrifying stuff. It’s unavoidable. But what are you more afraid of, really? Doing the thing and failing, or not doing the thing and then dying?
I didn’t start out writing this essay to position myself as some kind of beacon of fearful-but-anarchic wisdom. But here we are.
Fear is a daily and inescapable part of my life, in a big, big way. I’m scared to death of flying, but I travel 365 days a year. I’ve suffered from PTSD since an ill-fated motorcycle ride back when I used to be a bad ass, and yet I travelled two-up on the Ha Giang loop in remote northern Vietnam. I put my shoes on every day, despite the fact that you are never more than four feet away from a spider, for god’s sake!
I suppose what I’m saying is, if I can do it — myriad unlikely, ridiculous phobias and all — so can anyone.
Warmly,
Maggie
P.S. When I arrived in the UK in 2018, the first thing I did was join a narrowboat owners group and ask if anyone needed a boat sitter. Just a couple of weeks later I was living on one, on the Oxford Canal. I had no idea the narrowboat life was a dream of my dad’s — I only found out later. My dad’s daughter, I am.
There are so many similarities between your story and mine. I am constantly in fear but like you I do it anyways. Now that 50 is around the corner I continue to embrace life and slowly check off my bucket list. Miss you on IG, but glad to connect with you here. 💛
Ugh, THIS!!!! All of this. 💛 I'm scared of ALLLLL this things too, petrified. But when I get out of my own way for half a second, I know that the ultimate fear is dying and never having lived at all. Jesus that's terrifying. 😂 Thanks for writing, thanks for being scared and doing it anyway, thanks for inspiring. 🙏🏼