What Are Your REALLY Afraid Of?

When I was a little girl, often my father's mother would babysit us. She was from Russia, and what I remember most was she made me drink tea. Before bed. Tea I hated the taste of. She also used to curl my long hair by wrapping it in newspapers (old technique . . . especially if you were poor, as she was after she came to America). She was a pessimist, but it was only much later that I understood why--she had been wealthy in Russia, the Communist Revolution destroyed everything she and her family had--they murdered people she knew . . . family, she came to America, penniless and alone, lying about her age (she wasn't even 18 yet), struggled under great poverty in the melting pot of the lower East side of NYC. What was to be optimistic about? So I don't think I understood her because I was just too young to grasp all that. She was a chronic worrier. But now, of course, I realize she had everything in the world to worry about. But what I most remember was she was TINY. I mean, teeny-tiny, maybe 90 pounds soaking wet. In baby-sitting parlance, this meant that, were a bad guy to break into our house, were a marauding band of crazed mutants to break into our house, she would merely be a fragile little snack cake for them. THIS I understood quite clearly in third grade.

Overactive imagination? Oh yes. After all, I've become a novelist. And one night, my sisters and I worked ourselves into a shrieking mass hysteria because we were certain a man was waiting outside our bedrooms to kill us. We saw his shoes there at the doorway, lurking there. We screamed, we cried. My grandmother was hard of hearing.

Now, the other part of this is my parents frequently partied until at LEAST dawn. Many a time, in later years, I'd leave for high school and they would be toddling in. One New Year's Party were threw lasted until January 3rd. So our mass hysteria lasted until amost dawn when my parents came home to shrieking children and a sleeping mutant snack of Russian origin. The serial killer outside our bedrooms was ACTUALLY a pair of my father's shoes. Just shoes.

So it is with writing fears. Recently on the blog, some people opened up about a fear of rejection. But that's not it at all. You don't fear the rejection letter. A rejection letter is nothing more than shoes. What you FEAR are the mutants. The mutants could be:

• The Mutants of Humiliation. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, SOMEONE out there knows how pathetic a writer I am. I am embarrassed.
• The Mutants of Reality. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, I have to face something I am not ready to about my writing--that I need to learn more craft, that I am not "ready" to send this out there even though I thought I was.
• The Mutants of Inner Tapes. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, that negative internal tape I love to play over and over and over again . . . is just louder and louder and louder. That I've wasted my time. That I am kidding myself. That my mother/high school English teacher/ex-boyfriend, etc. is right.
• The Mutants of People Who Know Better. You know them. The negative bloggers. The people who have given up. The people who tell you that you can't succeed.

See? A rejection letter is just a SHOE. It's the mutants. What are you REALLY afraid of?

The other half of this story is that in the light of day, the shoes weren't terribly frightening. They were JUST shoes after all. When you bring the mutants out into sunlight, as ANY zombie-movie fan knows, they will turn into a shriveling, burning mass of flesh and die. Mutants can't take sunlight.

LEARN what your REAL fear is. Then bring it out into the light. Then you can move forward bravely. You need not fear being a snack cake.

Thoughts? What are you REALLY afraid of?