Fear, Writing and Oblivion
I first wrote a blog in 2012 under the title Spinning Through Trees. I spent forever thinking of a name that felt right, teasing words and phrases apart for something that felt profound but not too big or pretentious so that it would suit me, a 17 year old writer. I struggled for months to find something that fit until my exasperated mother (an artist and chief encourager of the blog) told me to think about times I was most happy or joyful and draw inspiration from there. It was summertime, warm and balmy. The sunlight possessing the exact golden quality required to transform leaves into jewels, their dappled shadows dancing in the breeze. All I really wanted to do, all I have ever really wanted to do, is play outside with the trees. I never fully grew out of the wild reckless joy that comes from running and spinning and playing somewhere green. So Spinning Through Trees seemed like the name. I wrote a grand total of three posts. reading them back, although my spelling has improved somewhat, the quality of my words reads much the same as when I write now. If only I had carried on. I would have loved to read what 17 year old me thought of the world. She was so creative and thoughtful.
I think what stopped me from writing more then might be the same thing that terrifies me about writing now. I am very close to completing my PhD in social anthropology, which means that I have learnt how to write and argue at the highest levels of academia. In many ways my job is being a writer. But despite this, the idea of writing as myself and not as Iona Walker PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh feels excruciatingly vulnerable.
I have always been fascinated by and drawn to the mystery of the world. Growing up with an artist and an engineer for parents gave me the gift of knowing that it takes both science and art to understand the world we live in. My sense of the profound drove my curiosity. I experienced the world around me with my senses and my imagination: talking to faeries, my soft toys, pets, stones, dragonflies, the sky. I would make hospitals for sea anemones at the beach for any caught high and dry in a rock pool and tell my parents that it was magic that made rain (that we can actually drink!!!) fall from the sky.
There was another side to this though. My greatest fear was oblivion, like being conscious for the heat death of the universe. I do not know how a six year old discovers that her greatest fear is eternal conscious nothing, but this was the overwhelming icy dread that lurked when I closed my eyes at night. I did not have the language to tell anyone why I couldn’t sleep and I had the sense that it wouldn’t make sense even if I did. Instead, I said I was afraid of driving lessons, because that seemed like a reasonable fear a person could have and was simple to explain to concerned parents*.
My point is, that I have always had a sense of the profound. It is at the secret core of everything that I do. From anthropology to falling in love. And I am afraid to talk about it. I am afraid that I am not equal to the task, that the scale of my wonder (and terror) far far exceeds my capacity to communicate it. Not clever enough or artistic enough or creative enough. And mostly, I am afraid of 1. being a failure and 2. a pretentious one at that. However, I have decided that I just don’t care anymore. I got over my fear of oblivion (or at least managed to coexist with it) by becoming so tired (literally and figuratively) of my fear that it became boring. It can get me another day. I am fine now, oblivion can wait. And so far it has. So now, in 2022 at 28, I am profoundly bored of being afraid.
Profound according to the Oxford English Dictionary means as an adjective: 1. “(of a state, quality, or emotion) very great or intense” 2. “(of a person or statement) having or showing great knowledge or insight”. In literature, profound can be used as a noun to mean “the deepest part of something, especially the ocean”. Pretentious on the other hand is defined as “attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed.” With these definitions in mind, the urge to go towards the profound, to seek all that is great, intense, of great knowledge and insight, to find and cherish the deepest part of something, seems like a worthy pursuit. I promise that I have no affectations about my own importance, and, although I would ask for kind eyes when assessing my merit, there are no allusions of grandeur here. I will be writing here, every other-ish day, for the forseeable future. Sometimes blog posts, sometimes short snippets of thoughts, perhaps a poem, even maybe an essay. If you would like to write to me, with a response, a question or just to send a letter into the void you can do that at spinningthroughtrees@gmail.com.
I will leave you with the the line that feels truer now more than ever. That “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”.
(*My loving grandparents on hearing my distress and seeking to give me strategies to self-soothe, told me to imagine Jesus on the end of my bed watching me when I would wake up from a bad dream. As you might imagine, this did not work and instead gave me another thing to worry about. Namely, that a strange man was watching me in my sleep who had the power to know my thoughts and potentially condem me to hell if he didn’t like what he saw was now in my bedroom.)