Fear is a cockroach
When I lived in the former Soviet Union, cockroaches scurried about our Moscow apartment. There was no getting rid of them. I found “tarakani” in my cereal, under bathroom pipes, darting among the frying pans. Flip on the kitchen light and a cluster of caramel colored beans scattered to the corners. I’d be so freaked out, I’d hit the switch and go back to bed. Tiny zombies — even smashed they keep moving, their splinter-legs scrabbling at the floor.
My Moscow years came to mind recently. I’ve been thinking about fear and why we bear it so long — parasitic but somehow precious. In my case, my relationship with fear started as an incorrigible childhood bedwetter in Washington, D.C. Plastic sheets, morning sponge baths, shame over declined sleepover invites. Throughout elementary school, humiliation and rejection were never far away. I learned guilt at an early age, and tics began learning my face. Miraculously, when we moved to Moscow when I was eleven, all those feelings fell away. It was like entering a new life as a new person. And as an American in the USSR, I was a novelty, exotic. Among the Russians, everyone wanted to be my friend. I was stared at, talked about, invited everywhere. But the insecurities, the anxiety, and specter of ostracism had merely been put on pause. It was waiting to welcome me back five years later when I returned to the States — an outsider in my homeland, hopelessly uncool, the vapors of self-loathing gathering in my throat. Fear is durable, patient. It hides in corners. It waits.
Fear is the cockroach of human emotions.
The scientific name of the order for cockroaches comes from the Latin — blatta, “an insect that shuns the light.” And just like the cockroach, fear works best in the dark. It can squeeze into the tiniest spaces, lay eggs in places you sealed up long ago. And before you know it, you’re finding panic scurrying in your chest and dread crawling beneath your skin.
No matter how much booze you douse it with, fear is impossible to drown. Like a cockroach, it can hold its breath a long time and wait forever. Well into adulthood, deep into sobriety, I felt the tug of fears formed so many years earlier.
As long as we’ve been sentient, fear has been with us. It always will be. It prompts us to arm ourselves, to be vigilant. Or retreat. It’s when we cower and turn inward that life is compromised, our potential held hostage, our sense of self murky. But if there’s one thing fear hates, it’s daylight. We can part the curtains, to trace its contours, and look without recoiling. When we treat our fear with curiosity and compassion instead of judgment and hate, progress can take hold. We see a path forward. Love, too, is durable, patient. Fear may still wound but love can bind. Love shines.
Love will survive us all.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. And while I have you on the line, please consider a donation to Herren Project, a leader in helping people get sober and stay sober. Alcoholics and addicts are not bad people, most of us have just been living too scared for too long.
