"The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing." - Socrates
What am I afraid of?
When answering the question of what one’s greatest fear is, I think it is important to delineate the difference between true fear and reactionary fear. Reactionary fear is the act of being startled by something unexpected or sudden, and it is the extreme application of that sense that the bulk of horror movies depend on to deliver their thrills. Even someone who is not afraid of spiders might find themselves momentarily startled, or frightened, when one unexpectedly lands on their lap. A loud noise, an unexpected touch, or even the absence of something expected can lead to a reactionary fear, but that is not true fear.
No, true fear is something that affects you before the object of that fear is even realized. The mere mention of it can invoke a sense of dread, and it is often something we think of even when that fear is inapplicable. True fear is something we dwell on past the moment of its initial sensation; it is not reactionary, but compulsory. We do not wish to feel that fear, nor are we confined merely to experiencing it when a specific stimulus triggers it; true fear transcends circumstance. True fear whispers and lingers, haunting us long after we are separated from any aspect of its influence, which is precisely what makes that fear so daunting; we are NEVER beyond the sphere of its influence.
I have only one such fear. Sure, if I am sitting in the shade of a lovely tree and a spider falls on my lap, I will be startled. Sure, if I am rounding a corner and someone jumps out and shouts “boo,” I will be startled. Through it all, however, there is only one thing I truly fear. This is the story of how I came to realize this fear, and how pervasive its hold has been on my interactions with those that I hold dear.
I could not have been any older than thirteen, now that I think about it. Puberty was in full swing, and the world was beginning to grow into a more complicated place. Girls held a certain sway I had never noticed before, hygiene was becoming a more important chore, and my responsibilities (both in school and at home) were beginning to increase as a preparation for what all the adults told me would lay ahead in my later adolescence. Truth be told, I was fascinated by that premise. Even as a young teen, I was introspective, spending much of my free time in thought, pondering the mysteries of the universe (and at that age, everything held a sense of mystery), and I began to grow a bit of a reputation with my peers for being “wise beyond my years.” In this instance, what they meant to say was that I thought more about society and my role in it than most at that age, but that should never be confused with “maturity.” As such, their frequent praise in this regard stroked my ego, and I grew to fit the role they slowly began casting for me. If any of them needed any insight at all, or any suggestion on how best to handle a situation, they would come to me. Never mind that I had never asked a girl out, or that I had never lived with physically abusive parents, or ran away from home, I had something to say on every problem people brought my way, and so I got into the business of giving advice.
That, in and of itself, is not such a bad thing. I was reckless with it, however; I did not preface my suggestions by saying “in my own opinion,” or “I’ve never been in your situation, but I think this is how I’d handle it;” no, I was very brazen in saying that “this is what you should do.” To make matters even worse, my advice was often unsolicited. To date myself (no one else would, at that time), “if you have a problem, I’ll solve it, check out my hook while the DJ revolves it.”
Problems came and went, but there was one specific friend I had at the time who came to me with an issue that would forever change my opinion on the giving of advice.
He and I were not particularly close, but we ran with the same crew, and he knew I had a penchant for offering insight most young teenagers could not pick up on, so he came to me with a girl related problem. It was a pretty cut and dry issue; he liked a girl but was convinced she did not know he existed, and his self-confidence was suffering as a result, which prevented him from asking her out, which in turn diminished his self-confidence even further…
…you know how it goes.
To say that I was aggressive with my responses would be a disservice to the forcefulness with which I spoke to this friend. From what I knew of this friend, tiptoeing around his feelings was not going to get through to him; he needed a tough love, of sorts, and I bore into him with the tenacity of a drill inspector having a bad day. My hope was to tear down what little self-esteem he had so we could build him up into someone more confident, but in doing so, I drove the man to an act of desperation.
After our talk, he was feeling pretty fired up, and he said to me, “I am feeling great about myself; I am going to put everything I have into asking this girl out!”
“Great!” I said, “Go get her, tiger!”
“I will!” he declared.
So he talked to her at school the next day.
“Hey, girl of my dreams, would you like to go to a movie with me, sometime?” he asked, less timidly then I had feared.
“Heh, um, no. Not even a little bit,” she replied with the casual cruelty only teenage girls are capable of.
We spoke very briefly after school that day. The conversation went a little something like this:
Me: “Hey, tiger, how’d it go?”
Him: “Hey, not good. She said no.”
Me: “Oh, man, I’m sorry! How are you holding up?”
Him: “Not great. I really gave that my all, you know?”
Me: “Yeah, I hear you. Well, I bet it feels good to know you tried, right?”
Him: “Not really, no. You don’t get it, I put everything I had in that, and she rejected me.”
Me: “Well, plenty of fish in the sea, right?”
Wrong.
I treated his comment of “…I put everything I had in that…” as dramatic hyperbole, but I could not have been further from the truth.
We lived in the same apartment complex, and later that night, an ambulance and police car arrived with their sirens blaring (the fire truck did not show up until all the excitement had already died down). It would seem that my friend had tried to hang himself, and was narrowly saved when his father came in to see if he needed help with his homework. No note, no final words to his parents, just a grim determination to end a life he felt had been spent wastefully on one hail mary date proposition.
He spent three days undergoing psyche evaluations before he came back home. I do not know all the particulars of his release, only that his family moved away later that month. I saw him on that final day as they were packing up the moving truck, and despite my normal sense of propriety, I had to ask him one question.
Me: “Why did you do it?”
Him: “You told me to.”
Me: “What? No I didn’t, I would never suggest anything that would hurt you!”
Him: “But you did.”
I did not understand at the time how poignant his remarks were. I thought he was confused, thinking I advised him to commit suicide when all I had done was help him find the courage to conquer his fear, but the truth was that I drove him to an edge he could not return from. He meant every word when he told me he had put everything he had in it, and when it came crashing down, his entire world fell with it. I advised him on something I knew next to nothing about, believing that theoretical musings could service practical application, and in doing so, I drove a friend to suicide.
So what am I afraid of?
I am not afraid of death. I am far too curious to learn what happens next, and though I do not hasten its arrival, I look forward to it with an almost macabre curiosity.
I am not afraid of being alone. While true that no man is an island, we are far hardier creatures than we tend to give ourselves credit for, and I do not buy into the despair that any loneliness now must be perennial.
No, what I am afraid of is giving you advice, having you take it, and then watch you suffer for it. I am afraid of being so presumptuous as to tell you how to live your life, get you to believe I am right, act on it, then bleed to prove how wrong I was. I am afraid of transforming my wisdom into your woe; a fear which holds sway over me even as I write this.
If any of my tales written thus far have a connecting theme, it would be the arrogance of youth, and there is no truth of my childhood more exemplary of that arrogance than this one. It is not that I nearly killed a man; no, I drove that man to the very depths of his sanity and shoved him past any and all semblance of personal comfort. I did not help him expand his personal boundaries so much as I demolished them all in the hope he would find something there in the remnants of his adolescent abyss. To that end, I succeeded, but what he brought back with him was a twisted thing, and to this day, I can picture his eyes as he said his final words. They were not the eyes of an angry man, nor were they the eyes of a crazy man. They were the eyes of a defeated man, a man who, on his friend’s advice, went up against the very fear which held him hostage and failed to conquer its hold on him. They were the eyes of a man who trusted me to help him, the eyes of a man who was betrayed by something he had dared to believe in.
They are the eyes of my own greatest fear. They see through me and all the carefully crafted facades; they strip away any sense of understanding I had about how the world worked, and revealed me as the charlatan I was. They are the eyes which stare at me, unblinking, whenever I dare to think that I know what is better for anyone than they do, themselves.
Socrates’ ancient words echo in my mind whenever I am faced with that haunting stare from yesteryear, but I will never be free from the dread I feel when I hear the phrase “you are wise beyond your years.” My fear taught me a valuable truth, however, in that you have to learn that you know nothing before you can begin to understand anything.
I guess it just goes to show that we are never too old for growing pains.
