When Fear Becomes The Doorway To Freedom

***(Trigger Warning: This post discusses themes of violence which includes disturbing images.)***

 

Fear of (fill in the blank) can feel like the biggest, scariest monster pursuing us, sometimes through multiple lifetimes.

Never relenting, we spend 90% of our energy avoiding whatever that monster is for us, attempting to run faster, blend in so it won’t see us, or bury our head in the sand so we at least lose sight of it for a time. Exhausting.

Of course, the only way to gain freedom from the beast stalking us, our greatest fear, is to stop running, stop avoiding, and face that fear head on. Easier said than done, I know. Our conscious choice is generally not to walk straight into the lion’s den. But God, what freedom can be found there.

Sometimes, if we’re really lucky, Mother Nature intervenes and throws us kicking and screaming straight into that toothy maw.

I can see her chucking me in a few times over the past decade, not hindered by emotion, tired of watching me struggle. “This is going to hurt like hell” as she heaves me into the dark opening, “but you’ll thank me for it.”

And it’s true, after the injuries heal, I always have.

I grew up with an intense fear of war.

Specifically atomic warfare, and a near obsession with WWII. Between the ages of fifteen and thirty, I read every book on the war that I could get my hands on. I read A World At Arms by Gerhard Weinberg twice, all 1178 pages. The second time I read it I took notes, because I couldn’t stand that I forgot details.

I wanted to remember that fourteen countries declared war on Germany before the United States got their hands dirty. That France, so psychologically paralyzed by WWI, entered an era of drift and despair which rendered them incapable of standing up to Germany. That Norway’s ferocious defense against the German invasion shocked and stunned the entire world. Germany’s navy never quite recovered from Norway’s response to their attack.

I wanted to remember every detail because I thought it was my duty to care. Across the world over 60 million people died in that war, including six million Jewish people systematically murdered.

Approximately 3% of the global population died in that war, when the world came together to defeat inhumanity and fascism.

I felt like I needed to remember that. I felt compelled to bear witness to their suffering in some way, however minuscule.

Meanwhile, all of this was highly baffling to my friends and family.

WWII ended 25 years before I was even born. Most people had moved on. My parents, having no idea how to handle this, declared a law in my household whereby it was illegal to mention the word “Holocaust” or “atomic” or any other word associated with any world war. My friends just scratched their heads. Teenage mall talk doesn’t compute. I was a weird egg, but they accepted this about me.

They thought I was smart, that I knew impossibly much about history as a teenager.

It wasn’t intelligence. It was obsession. I knew very little about anything else other than WWII.

I believe when there is enough confusion in the psyche, obsession sometimes arrives to make order out of chaos.

I also believe there are certain phenomena our human minds cannot fathom.

There are certain things we may never know.

Our minds just aren’t built for it, the right discovery not yet made.

We all have our beliefs surrounding what happens when we die, and for me there seems to be sufficient evidence for reincarnation. When I connected with the possibility that I had been involved in WWII, my entire system opened with relief.

As a very young child, I had for years a recurring dream about a blood red river flowing through a charred, annihilated landscape filled with dead people. My mother was so disturbed by the dream that she had absolutely nothing to say when I mentioned I’d had it again.

How was my five-year-old brain producing such horrifying images, so detailed, when my mother was militantly vigilant that I never witness anything that even skirted the edges of violence across any media?

A feeling like coming home.

Fast forward decades when, at the age of 39, I watched a movie called Grave of the Fireflies by Studio Ghibli, a film about the American atomic bombs being dropped on Japan.

In the film, the scene of my childhood recurring dreams, the blood red river, the charred, annihilated landscape filled with human remains, was frame-by-frame depicted in the film. Every astonishing detail.

I believe I was in Nagasaki when that bomb came down. I don’t know how. Or if it’s all the telepathic download of a somebody else’s direct experience. My mind is open to all possibilities but my spirit is certain; I was there in some way.

And so, imagine the irony that a month ago I moved to the birthplace of the Atomic Bomb.

I now share a point on the map with Los Alamos National Lab, where Oppenheimer and scientists from around the world released a horrible genie that could never be stuffed back into the bottle.

Imagine how strange it feels to wander through the atomic museum there and to see twenty-foot black and white images of a ruined Nagasaki and Hiroshima wallpapered around an entire room, like you’re actually standing there among the post-apocalyptic ruins.

Moving to Los Alamos feels like the completion of a karmic cycle for me.

A karmic cycle powered by fear.

Closure.

There could be no greater symbolism for me.

I’m here to face my fears, to come full circle.

My soul needed to return to where it all started.

So when I drive by the particle accelerator, past the armed guards at the gateway to the National Lab, down Oppenheimer Drive, Manhattan Avenue, the Bradbury Science Museum, all of it…it feels a little like freedom.

It feels like being in the biggest lion’s den of my lifetime and watching my life bloom…not detonate.

There is no greater freedom than sitting in the den of my biggest fear, feeling the breath of the lion…

…and feeling only compassion for how far I’ve come.

On the other side of every faced fear, lies a peace so deep it can’t be shaken.

Tell me, what is your lion?

Much Love,

Kristy