JACKASS FEAR

I sit here in the clammy grip of pure fear. My hands and feet are cold, even though the room is warm. Sweat trickles down my arms and down my sides from my armpits. I cannot think; my stomach churns; I cannot get up and leave. It is a form of hell. What is this fear? Where does it come from? Why don't I do something about it?

The fear has two sources: It is both the fear of success and the fear of failure. This is why I sit, locked like the proverbial jackass. Immobile. Caught an equal distance from the two fears just as Burien's ass was immobilized between the two equal stacks of hay, starving to death. If there was only one fear, or if one of the fears was stronger than the other, I would be able to break the grip of fear. I would run; perhaps even write!

No! The two fears are too equal and too powerful. So I sit as if hypnotized, as if some evil force is in control, as if caught in Circe's thrall, as if I am a spineless jellyfish caught in a vortex without an exit.

I tremble from the fear and the sweat continues to trickle. I do not exaggerate, nor do I change, even when my mind knows--as clearly as any mind can know--exactly what the fears are and what they are doing to me. Knowing is not enough. Rationality is

insufficient. Neither knowing nor rationality are enough when the mind and the body are trapped as mine are. Such entrapments are the stuff of alcoholism and other addictions, including the "king" of all addictions, procrastination.

The fear of failure seems the easier of the two to understand and to accept. Failure is unpleasant. It rips at the ego like a buzz-saw going through balsa wood. It diminishes the spirit. It savages the self-concept. It is the stuff of clinical depression.

The fear of success, on the other hand, makes no apparent sense. We are a society that champions success. Both striving for success and attaining it are highly valued. Achieving success is one of the central values of our culture.

The idea that success should be feared seems patently ridiculous. There is no obvious, rational, sensible basis for such a fear. The fear of success, therefore, must be enigmatic. The layers of the enigma must be peeled away to see what lies beneath--to reveal what is deeply hidden. It is there that understanding will be found, if at all.

Striving for success makes demands and requires the assumption of burdens. Priorities must be set and adhered to. Sacrifices must be made. Success usually is a long-term process, one that only "arrives" after a lot of extremely hard work, most often after much frustration and many disappointments.

Maintaining success requires everything that striving for success does, with the additional burden of the responsibility for keeping what has been won. The successful person is much like a runner on a treadmill when the treadmill keeps going faster and faster. Just to "keep up" requires great additional effort.

Success may result in the loss of personal "freedom." The duties, responsibilities and demands of success have ways of "running" the successful person's life, rather than the other way around. The demands can be deadly, as the rates of personal problems, including suicide among the successful, attest.

There you have it. There are powerful and understandable reasons for the dual fears of success and of failure. While each of us who is paralyzed by the affliction may have a different configuration of reasons, common forces are inherent in the problem. Whatever the reasons, the results are the same. Fear. Inertia. Paralysis. Procrastination. Addictions. A focus on anything and everything that takes the person--for however long--away from the path toward success or failure.

Can the dual fears be conquered? Perhaps, but not easily (I will offer some suggestions at the end of this article). The resistance to overcoming both fears, or one of the fears sufficiently to end the stalemate, is both the enigma and the challenge. Awareness of the nature and the roots of the problem should lead to the solution. Once aware, why is it that a person can not merely change her or his thinking and behavior to end the problem? Why are people that are caught in the dilemma so helpless?

The powers that hold a person in the inertia zone are much like the powers that hold the procrastaholic, the alcoholic or any addict. Mark Twain said it well when he said something like, "It is easy to quit smoking; I have done it a thousand times." It is just as easy for the alcoholic to say, "I'll never take a drink again." Or for the procrastaholic to say, "Tomorrow I will set aside my procrastination and 'just do it.'"

Here is the crux of the problem, the center of the enigma, the heart of the dilemma. The best predictor of future thought and behavior is past thought and behavior. Many of us find the pain of inertia more tolerable than what the unknown realms of success or of failure may bring.

What is known to us is more comfortable--no matter how uncomfortable that may be--than that which the unknown may hold. The promises to change dissolve in the reality of the power of the twin fears. The alcoholic goes back to drink. The nicotine addict

returns to cigarettes. The procrastaholic fritters away her or his time--doing almost anything except that which would lead to success or to failure.

Hell? Yes, it is a form of hell. In one sense, it is a self-imposed hell that is created and maintained by the mystery of the human being's inability to do that which intellectually the person knows she or he "should" do or "wants" to do. It is the hell that stems from knowing that there are things over which we have little or no effective control.

Does this mean that there is no hope? No! I must believe there is hope. The history of many famous writers is further evidence of hope, because that history is replete with evidence that even some of the most famous writers overcame their twin fears and moved on to success.

While each one has to find her or his own way out of the inertia, here are some suggestions: Write. Write at least daily. Write "anything" that you can write. With writing, comes confidence. Writing loosens the bonds of fear driven inertia. Prepare. When I have the most trouble with the twin demons of fear of success and of failure, it is often because I have not fully prepared myself for the writing task. This is true even for fiction writing, where the research for settings, technology . . . the entire content needs to be fact-based, or at least have some anchor in the human body of knowledge.

Talk about your fears with family, friends or even a professional. Bring your fears out of their "closet" and into the open. Openness and discussion may unseat the balance of those fears.

Maybe, just maybe, I can begin to overcome the inertia of the twin fears by writing about my fears, my procrastination, my Hell. It might work for you, too.