I used to fear the dark. Some nights, when I was little, I'd fall asleep reading on the couch downstairs, only to wake up a few hours later and find that night had fallen. I'd jolt awake, snap my head left and right, trying to make out the room, and take the stairs by two, not daring to look behind me for fear of what the darkness might hold.
Sometimes, after watching those sensationalized late-night History Channel shows, I'd peer out the window, imagining that somewhere in the darkness of my backyard lurked little green men or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It would take hours to fall asleep. I read to allow my swirling imagination to settle.
One night, as I was reading "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” I came across the "boggart": a shape-shifting creature known to hide itself in tight spaces like drawers or wardrobes. Once brought out into the open, the boggart takes the form of the observer's worst fear. When I finished the chapter with the boggart, I set the book down and wondered what form my boggart would take. Probably the dark.
A few years later, after my parents divorced, I found something new to fear: love itself. Divorce could happen to me. It was terrifying to think that I could fall in love with someone, marry her, live together for years and years, even have a child together, and then wake up one day to find I no longer loved her or she no longer loved me. I started to fear love for fear that it wouldn't last.
By ninth grade, my fears had evolved further. I was then afraid of losing my aging dad. I was afraid he would have a heart attack all alone in the little house in the country where he had moved, where cell reception was spotty and an ambulance would have to limp along a winding gravel road riddled with potholes just to make it to his door. I was afraid each winter would be the last time I'd feel his chilled rough hands gripping my warm smooth ones after a day spent outside in the cold. I was afraid he wouldn't be around much longer to call me his "human radiator."
Now, I find myself fearing a host of things: choosing the wrong courses, receiving a disappointing midterm grade, missing out on time with friends. Compared to my old fears, these seem inconsequential. But beneath them all lurks a fear I suspect is common at Duke: the fear of failing to live a meaningful life. When you share this university with the likes of Melinda Gates and Grayson Allen, Tim Cook and Paul Modrich, not to mention the extraordinary people in your own class whose praises were so publicly sung at Convocation freshman year, it's easy to think you'll never quite measure up.
We will always live with fear but that does not mean we must always live in fear. Living in fear means seeing life "through a glass, darkly," that is, through the sort of distorted lens that oddly magnifies the unimportant and casts the entire world in sullen hues. This is a paralyzing way of approaching fear. Living with fear doesn't require us to conquer our fears once and for all, but it does ask us to reconcile with our fears, dig to the root of why we fear what we fear and embrace those fears for what they show about us. In other words, living with fear means seeing our fears "face to face." Once you live with your fears, they don't seem all that scary anymore, just as after a young witch or wizard performs the Riddikulus Charm, the boggart transforms from terrifying to laughable.
Growing up was a series of transitions from living in fear to living with fear. I flipped the light switch on and off and gradually acclimated myself to the dark. I reconciled myself to my parents' divorce, coming to see it as a wise decision that stopped their marriage from ruining their friendship—a decision I would have made had I been in their shoes. I told my dad about how much I worried about his health, and he now makes a point to keep me informed after each cardiologist appointment. And when I receive a disappointing midterm, I try to view it as a sign I'm being challenged, a charge to seek out extra help and study a little harder, and not a red-ink markdown on my worth as a human being.
It’s also easy to fall into the trap of discounting your fears. Surely, someone else is shouldering a heavier burden; another person has greater fears than yours. This comparative thinking is emotional evasion disguised as humility, another distortion that prevents us from coming to terms with our own very real fears. Minimizing our fears does not reconcile us with them. Our fears are as much a part of us as our voices and memories and fingerprints. We can live in fear, and give our fears the power to paralyze us at any moment, or we can live with fear, and recognize what our fears tell us about our own identities. The latter course grants us agency.
It also gives us empathy. When we stop minimizing our own fears, we stop minimizing others’ fears too. We don’t doubt or scoff or hector when a friend tells us he’s afraid. Instead, we listen. We learn. We lend a hand.
Matthew King is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs on alternate Mondays.
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