I’m standing on stage in front of 150 people, the spotlight bright in my eyes, the microphone solid in my hand. Their faces stare up at me, expectantly. I’m there to tell them a story. For a lot of people, being on stage in this way is a nightmare. Stage fright can make your heart pound, your mouth go dry, your limbs quake. But not me. I’m comfortable here. My worst nightmare awaits me later, at home. It’s also what I’m on stage to talk about.
“For decades—my whole life, practically—I’ve lived with a persistent, debilitating fear of being murdered in my bed,” I tell the audience. They laugh uproariously. They’re not being insensitive—I’m telling it funny. That’s how I always tell it. I run through the list of ghosts that haunt my overactive imagination: Sasquatch, vampires, Adolf Hitler, the Loch Ness Monster, Jesus—that crown of thorns, all that blood—those phantoms of my childhood. Then the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer—the true-crime menaces of my late-night adolescent reading. Fear has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember.
It’s not totally surprising. I was a girl in the 1970s and ’80s in southern Ontario. I read the newspaper every day from the age of nine or ten, and my mother’s magazines—Family Circle, Women’s Day—and they were all always cover-to-cover, it seemed, with violence against girls and women. Kids my age disappearing from the hallways of their apartment buildings, or last seen on the subway heading downtown to a movie with friends. Women like my mother followed through parking lots, pulled into vans, when out for a walk, flagged down
to help someone in need, and then never heard from again. I learned to walk with my keys threaded through my fingers. I read conflicting advice on whether to fight or submit. When my hair was long, I learned to keep it tucked into my coat so it couldn’t be used to apprehend me from behind.
Fear has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember.
Some of that fear was caution, and self-preservation, I guess. It was the water I was swimming in—misogyny and men’s violence against women was baked into the society in which I grew up, from the news headlines, to the murder mysteries my mother read, to the movies and television shows we all watched. But that fear also flicked a switch in me that was hard to switch off. I became hyper-alert.
’Fraidy Cat
Looking back now, I can see I was living with anxiety from the time I was small. We didn’t call it that, then. We called it oh don’t be such a baby, and she’s afraid of her own shadow, and don’t be ridiculous. And to be fair, a lot of what I was afraid of was utterly ridiculous. Parked cars (they could become moving cars at any moment!), our furnace room (likely last known location of Sasquatch), a picture of a marble bust in a book (I can feel that statue watching me). As a lifelong writer, my imagination was my best friend. It was also, it seemed, bent on terrorizing me. And I was helpless before its infinite power.
I knew how to make it funny, though. And I did that, in the daylight hours. The story of my fear became one of my funniest set pieces, one I returned to again and again, especially once I learned, later than is comfortable to admit, that not everyone is paralyzed by fear at night. When I realized that this fear was unusual, I went to town, pulling out every formative experience that solidified my terror. I’d gotten up to pee one night when I was seven or eight, and, half-asleep, collided with my father who was making the rounds of us kids, ensuring we were safe and sound before he and my mother turned in. Scared the daylights out of me. The night I’d stayed up, home alone at the age of 17, reading about the Zodiac Killer, too scared to go to sleep till I got through the story, and utterly uncomforted by the inconclusive ending—the Zodiac Killer was still out there! What if he was in Mississauga, Ontario, in my boring, quiet neighborhood? What if he was outside my very house right now! Is that the sound of the front door easing open? Footsteps on the staircase? (Never mind the contortions of logic, the self-centering acrobatics involved in the dark fantasy that this infamous murderer would target little old me.) I lay in my bed and shook. A figure at my bedroom door, barely visible in the first streaks of dawn. I opened an eye. My father, again. He and my mom and my younger siblings had been on a road trip and decided to drive all night for home.
Here, I feel I should say a word about my father: He was gentle and smart, stubborn and fair, capable and wise. I loved him and he loved me. I was never afraid of him. But he did have a way of being in the wrong place at the right time.
On stage, the crowd loved these stories, laughing and gasping at all the right moments. But lately, I’d had the sense that maybe this fear of mine wasn’t hilarious. I’d been telling two friends about it, in my jokey way, and they looked concerned. “It’s OK!” I said. “It’s hilarious!” But their reaction stayed with me. Maybe it wasn’t hilarious—or at least, maybe that’s not all it was.
After the show, women found me outside the venue to tell me how much my story resonated. They, too, were afraid of being murdered in their beds, and they were so glad to know they weren’t alone. It was worth it, I thought, and I floated home on the wave of praise and belonging. I had my best night of sleep in a long time, no fear, even though my spouse was out of town and I was alone in our three-bedroom house.
The next night, though. Wow.
Fear Itself
It started early, before darkness had even truly fallen. I worked from home, alone, with no fear during the day. I taught creative writing to my students as the sun set. The parents of one of my students had been in the audience the night before, and the dad made a weird comment at pickup time. The switch in my mind flicked to High Alert. When the students and parents cleared out of my living room I noticed the little twinkle lights I keep along the mantel in winter were switched on—and I hadn’t done it.
If this were a television drama, the violins would be layering in tension. The Fear had me and it wasn’t going to let up.
In bed that night I reminded myself I’d checked the doors and they were locked. My mind imagined a patient murderer, lying in wait for me. I lay in bed, solid with fear. I held my breath. Every sound magnified. The absence of sound untrustworthy—surely the calm before the violins returned.
I’d doze, then wake, heart pounding, was that a sound? What was that sound? The front door easing open? The back? Someone coming in the kitchen window? Is there someone in this room? My eyes strained to tease out the strands of darkness that surrounded me.
This was a familiar routine. It was my nightly opera. I tried to talk myself out of my fear: Don’t be ridiculous.
What would that even look like, a life without this persistent, pervasive fear?
This is the most egotistical fantas