The Woman Who Interviewed Her Fear

A woman I know — the kind of competent person other people describe as 'unflappable' without ever asking her about it — decided, at thirty-eight, to interview her fear. She had read something about journalling, and something else about therapy, and had, being a serious person, combined them into a method of her own. She sat down one Saturday morning with a notebook, a coffee, and a list of questions she had prepared the night before, as if her fear were a difficult source for a long-form piece.

Her first question was practical. 'What do you do for a living?' The answer, when she wrote it out, surprised her. Her fear was not, as she had assumed, in the business of protecting her from danger. It was in the business of protecting her from embarrassment. When she looked back over the last five years — the promotion she had not applied for, the essay she had not submitted, the person she had not asked out — she saw that none of the things she had avoided had been genuinely dangerous. They had, however, all carried some risk of being seen, badly, by someone she cared about.

Her second question was, 'How long have you had this job?' The answer, once she started tracing it, went back to a specific afternoon in year eight, involving a maths teacher, a wrong answer, and a classroom of teenagers who laughed for approximately eleven seconds. Her fear had been employed, without a performance review, since 1998. It had been earning a full salary for twenty-eight years to protect her from an eleven-second incident.

Her third question was the important one. 'Are you still the right person for the job?' Her fear was quiet for a while. When it answered, it did so in the voice of an old employee who had suspected, for a long time, that the company had outgrown him and was too polite to say so. 'Probably not,' it said. 'But nobody has told me what else to do.'

She did not fire her fear. You cannot fire your fear, and if you could, you would regret it within a week; there are, in every life, situations for which a competent fear is the correct professional. She reassigned it. She wrote, in the notebook, a short new job description. Fear was to remain on staff. It was to continue handling actual danger, sensible risk, and cliff edges. It was to hand back to her, with a memo, all cases involving mere social discomfort, unfamiliar rooms, and the possibility of looking foolish in front of adults.

It took months for the reassignment to bed in. Old employees do not change their habits quickly. But within a year she had applied for the job, submitted the essay, and asked out the person, and had been, respectively, rejected, published, and delighted. The fear, meanwhile, was doing quieter, better work — pointing out actual cliffs, actual scams, actual people who were not to be trusted. It seemed, for the first time in twenty-eight years, useful.

You can, if you would like, hold your own interview. Take the notebook. Ask the three questions. Listen honestly to the answers. You may find that the thing you thought was guarding your life has, in fact, been quietly running it, and would be relieved, at last, to be given a smaller and more suitable desk.