Halloween special: My biggest fear.....is zombies

I kid you not. My fear of zombies is so great we’ve had to stop watching ‘The Walking Dead’ in our household.

I am that scared.

It’s not even especially because of what happens in the shows, though the ‘he’s behind you’ adrenaline buzz does tend to last a fair while after the credits roll.

It’s the really bad dreams I have.

In these dreams I am the only one in the house who has any comprehension of the danger we’re in.

The other people laugh and chat. They mosey, even.

I alone hear the moan of the approaching hoard.

Rigor mortis

One is in the house already. I hide and try not to breathe in the foul, sickly-sweet stench of its rotting flesh. It moves away and I relax and begin to move, a moment too soon. Spotted I run. Upstairs. It stumbleruns behind me, determined. I grab the ladder to the loft crying and am almost up when its hand, cold, reptilian-ridged, grips my ankle. Rigor mortis.

I wake up. But actually that’s little comfort. In the darkness I am confident there’s a zombie in the house.

And, it’s my fault the zombie is in the house, because I’m the one imagining it in the house.

"I’m scared I’m not good enough or about to fail in a massive and tragically impactful way"

You see the really big trouble is I have this childish belief that I can imagine Things into Being. Scary stuff.

I have normal fears too. You know the run of the mill ones. The ones where I’m confident that I’m going to let people I care about down; where I’m scared I’m not good enough or about to fail in a massive and tragically impactful way (maybe by not alerting you all to the zombie apocalypse in time….).

Big Magic

But, as Elizabeth Gilbert points out in her new book BigMagic, Fear is really really BORING.

Everyone has Fear and it has one job, which is to shout STOP STOP STOP really loud, until you realise the danger you’re in and, well, do as you’re bid and STOP whatever crazy, creative, or even just plain normal activity you are about to embark on.

"I can kind of spot that it’s Maureen from my internal Anxiety Department..."

The trouble is, when that Fear pops up, say at work, I can kind of spot that it’s Maureen from my internal Anxiety Department and that’s she’s dropped her Catastrophising Files all over my desk again.

And I know that Maureen is very lovely and works very hard but has absolutely no perspective whatsoever and that this isn’t really the calamity that she’s claiming it to be.

However I still have to clean up the mess that Maureen’s created. And that’s exasperating.

Sensible, fully-functioning adult 

And because I’m a sensible and fully-functioning adult I have to excuse her and demonstrate to those around me that really ‘I get it, she’s just being silly and of course I know it’s all going to be all right really.’

But here’s what I’m starting to think the lovely Maureen does. Sick to the back of her neat white teeth (brushed for exactly the right amount of time each morning and evening) of always being ignored or told that’s she silly, Maureen bides her time.

"...she’s letting me use the Really Sharp Kitchen Knives without even a mutter of caution.."

At home, probably whilst I’m happily chopping vegetables and listening to the radio, Maureen is pacing the depths of my internal Anxiety Department. She’s abandoned the filing (in fact, given that she’s letting me use the Really Sharp Kitchen Knives without even a mutter of caution, it looks like the kid has gone off duty for the day to all intents and purposes).

Terrifying costume

But far from it. Maureen is in fact rooting out the most terrifying costume she can muster. Gone are the 1950s librarian glasses. Gone the neatly coiffured hair, tied back in a powder blue bow. Gone the beige silk blouse, pencil skirt and sensible shoes.

In the passing of a simple evening, Maureen has transformed herself into the most gruesome and believable zombie ever and is currently making her way towards the Dream Department.

So, it is in fact her grim determination I can feel gripping my ankle as I fail to ascend the loft in my dream. And here is the answer as to how I can have a raft of zombie dreams despite the absence of all scary TV input!

Firm but fair

Now I’ve never done this before to be honest with you. Stood far enough, and playfully enough, back from fears to give them a personality, until today.

But back to Big Magic - Gilbert is very clear on the importance of seeing your fear as a real person. Moreover, she recommends having a full on conversation with your fear. Firm but fair is her approach.

She says, absolutely invite Fear along on the road trip of life, but be clear that Fear must sit in the backseat, and she must not at any point take the steering wheel, set the direction of travel or even change radio stations.

Because your fear will always be there. She has a really important job to do – namely to ensure that you survive. That, in fact, you have survived this far along the evolutionary trail is thanks in part at least to your fear (thanks Maureen!).

Now, I don’t know if taking this personal approach to my fears will really help (though in fact I can already hear Maureen twittering away about the ridiculousness of it all which has to be a good sign).

I do know though that just telling myself my fears are ‘just silly’ and that I am silly for having them hasn’t previously been an effective way of managing them. 

And besides, I’m almost looking forward to my next zombie dream when, Scooby-doo style, I can unmask my zombie attacker for who she really is and have Maureen say “Darn, and I’d've gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you pesky kids!”

Almost looking forward to it….Happy Halloween y’all!

#bigmagic #halloween #fear #anxiety #zombies #thewalkingdead

Watching season four of the Walking Dead, writing stories, and reading course materials....

The Walking Dead TV series is back.

There was a period of time earlier this year when my existence was measured out in episodes of the Walking Dead.  My housemates and I would ‘reward’ ourselves at the end of an evening with a shot of pure horror.

I was scared from the first episode of the first series.  Needing to resolve that fear, to get to the ‘happy ever after’ kept me tuning in. 

I have spent many episodes watching parts of the show from behind my hands, my head buried in a cushion, with one eye peeking out.

I’ve spent a lot of the heart racing 45 minutes shouting at the stupidity of the characters.  I’ve made some bad calls on staying up to watch ‘just one more’ rather than going to bed to get a good nights sleep – all in the insatiable search for resolution. 

I’ve been angry at the show for breaking all the rules, giving us too many characters, none of whom we can relate to terribly easily and then, just when we think we’re established with someone – bam (or more like sucking blood type noise and the gnawing of flesh amid screams) they are dead.  And then dangerously undead.  *Shudder*

By the end of season three I became hardened to zombies and to endless zombie death.  Scenes that only weeks earlier would have had me diving for cover and wanting but not wanting to see the horror unfold I now sat through quite brazenly. I was even able to critique whether or not they were ‘good’ zombies from a makeup, costume and acting point of view.

Imagine my horror – forgive the pun – moments into settling down to watch season four this week* to discover that I really didn’t want to watch it.

The Fear was back.  My heart pounding, my palms sweaty, my brain reeling from the realisation that this universe had not gone away, that there were still people trapped in this world.  I was back to hiding my head in cushions again.

Watching the Walking Dead is exhausting.  I invest an enormous amount of emotional energy working out what I would do in the same situation whenever any of the characters find themselves faced with life or death. 

To be fair, my emotional engagement in most things is pretty intense. I remember a friend finding me with tears streaming down my face as I read a biography on Virginia Woolf a few years ago.  She stopped by to ask if I was okay and was pretty stunned when I looked up and croaked, ‘Virginia Woolf just died’.

But that is the beauty of a story that works.  I’ve been compulsively reading a novel (this is bad on at least three counts – (i) that it may have distracted me from more academic reading this weekend; (ii) that  (i) is why generally I ban myself from novel reading in term time and (iii) because it was……a bodice ripper, another darned historical novel – shhhhh!). 

For the sake of my grades at least I have, thankfully, finally finished it. But again what drew me back and back was that I hated, literally hated, one of the main characters.  He was a thorough ‘bad un’ and my leading lady was behaving in a way I thought was really rather pathetic (as well as unethical). 

Wanting resolution, wanting the universe to be set right was again the driving force behind my addictive pattern of reading.

Much of my own writing tends to be character rather than plot led.  This can mean I spend forever wondering around in a universe with someone who is quite lovely and complicated but doesn’t really have anything to do.  Unsurprisingly I lose interest in him/her, decide my idea is rubbish and move on. 

With my latest revelation from the weekend I think I’m going to challenge myself in the next few weeks to write each next paragraph in an opposing direction – make the character do the thing I least like/least want them to do and see what happens.

This is after, of course, I have caught up on all my university reading…

(*apologies to @bdesignforge – really happy to watch it again with you?!?  Stew and popcorn and whatnot included!)