Naming Your Fear
In October of 1961, about three weeks before I turned five, my left arm crashed through a pane of glass on our front door.
The glass did no damage until I tried to pull my arm back out.
Our family doctor, I’ll call him Dr. A, happened to be out of town at the time so my mother took me to another doctor who I’ll call Dr. C.
I remember bleeding and crying, but not the car ride there.
In the exam room, Dr. C tried unsuccessfully three times to give me a shot to numb my arm.
He decided to go ahead and stitch me up anyway.
He tried to distract me by telling me there was a hole in the wall that moved around and that if I could catch it at the right moment, I’d see people in the next room who were worse off than me.
What kind of crap is that to tell a four year old who is bleeding and crying and is about to get stitched up with no anesthetic?
So when I got to the first grade in Catholic school, and Dr. C was the school doctor, and it was time for our regular immunizations (back in the day, we were immunized at school), guess who cried and kicked and screamed not to get the shots.
Yup.
I was deathly afraid of those shots.
I remember one incident where I kept moving to the back of the line as more kids arrived. I have no idea how it turned out, I just remember the fear.
And so I assumed that I was terrified of needles-not all needles-just the ones someone wanted to jab me with.
Fast forward ten-plus years, and I’m with my best friend Marcy having blood drawn for a Wassermann test- the VD test required to work in a healthcare facility.
We were getting jobs at the local nursing home.
I told the nurse with the needle that she could take all the blood she wanted as long as I could watch and see what she was doing. I didn’t like surprises.
Fast forward another five or so years and I was in boot camp going through the shot line where there were three people on either side of the line giving out shots.
I kept my place in line and didn’t shed a tear.
I was in my fifties before I realized that I was not necessarily afraid of the needles as much as I was afraid of Dr. C.
It was years after I began writing before I let anyone read any of it. I figured it wasn’t anything anyone else would want to read.
After I let a friend read one of my pieces, I got a lot of encouragement from her to get it out there. (Thanks Deb!) But I couldn’t, not yet anyway.
So what was I afraid of?
After mulling over the question and coming up with a lot of crappy answers (afraid of failure, afraid of success, afraid no one could relate, etc… ) I realized that the thought of putting my work out there made me feel like that dream where you get to school on the first day of second grade, you take off your coat and find that you forgot to get dressed.
When I dug through all the crap, I found that I was just afraid of being vulnerable.
That’s all that was standing between me and my dream of being a writer.
It’s not always easy putting myself out there, but when my words connect with someone, it feels like magic.
If you have a dream, why aren’t you pursuing it?
Dig deep. If you can name your fear, you can beat it!
~~~
Join our community
Subscribe to get our latest content by email.
Great piece Carol! Wow – can’t believe that bit about stitching up a 4-year-old without anesthetic. That’s like a dentist I’ll call Dr. T who used to drill my teeth without novocaine. To this day I am terrified of the dentist. I have a lovely dentist who is kind, considerate and compassionate, but my anxiety level ramps up every time he looks at my teeth! Your piece gives me food for thought. As you may know, I am in a writing class. One of my fellow writers asked me to send her one of my pieces from a class she had missed. She replied via email and corrected some of my punctuation and grammar. It crushed me, and made me a little bit angry. I didn’t ask her to edit my work, and I would never dream of editing anyone else’s unless asked! Now I find myself feeling embarrassed to read in front of the group, thinking I am being judged for my poor grammatical choices and incorrect punctuation. “Did you ever hear of an en-dash?” she asked. Why yes, I have heard of one but I’m really not sure how to use it (thinking, not my response). I just stood there, again feeling embarrassed and perplexed. We have a writer in our class who is dyslexic. Her grammar and punctuation, not to mention capitalization, is atrocious! BUT – she writes some of the most beautiful pieces, and I have saved every one of them. Oops – should I have used that -, or should it have been an en-dash? Perhaps an em-dash? Or is it an en-dash? Who cares? I’m going to read my stories with all of their faults and not feel afraid to do so. My friend told me to use a disclaimer before reading. Something along the lines of, “I’m writing for myself, to tell my family stories. I know I don’t have the best writing skills, but I am not here to have my work edited. I’m just here because writing brings me joy!” Not sure that’s the best wording. I may have to work on that to soften it a bit so the woman who called me out doesn’t feel called out. Thanks again Carol. I love keeping in touch with my Walnut Street family. Talked to Marcy the other day about a tree question! It felt good to hear a Lester on the other end of the line 🙂
Putting youngsters through that kind of trauma really stays with you, doesn’t it? That dentist should have had his license revoked! No wonder so many people are scared to go to the dentist. It gives me pain just to think about getting a drilling without Novocaine! Yikes!
Quite some time ago, I joined a critique group (does your group usually critique each other’s pieces or do you all write a piece from the same prompt just to improve your skills?) but I can’t believe how much I have learned from them. One woman is great at the punctuation and grammar, I’m not. I almost never use a semicolon, I use too many commas, I’m never sure where to put the quotation marks in relation to the punctuation, etc… I decided that I’m the kind of writer who writes by ear. I don’t know all the rules (nor do I really care to) but I write in a way that sounds good to me (kind of like a musician who can’t read music). I feel like if it gets my point across, I’ve done my job!
Within a little community of writers, I think everyone wants to be helpful to the other writers. I figure that if you point my errors out to me here, in the safety of our group, it saves me the embarrassment of having someone outside the group discover it. It also helps me with clarity because I know what I mean, but maybe someone else doesn’t get it from what I wrote. Your stories will probably be passed down to children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. What a gift for them to treasure and pass on to their children. It helps me to think that those who correct my work are the ones who want to see me succeed the most.
Never be embarrassed to read your work out loud. That’s the part about being vulnerable that I was talking about. It’s hard to stand naked in front of the whole second grade class. But if we block ourselves off from anything getting in, we also block ourselves off from anything getting out and that would be such a shame.
Carol, you and Nancy haven’t read any ee commings no caps no punctuation
I’ve read some…long ago and far away!
I was at Mercy Hospital a couple months ago and, down by the chapel they have a long hallway filled with portraits of various doctors associated with the hospital. There on the wall, in all his anonymity, is a picture of Dr. C. On the good side, there’s also a picture of Dr. Ignachek (sp?) who saved our Mom!!! Let me know, I’ll take you to see them while you are home, if you like!
That would be awesome!