Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave - Hardcover

Fear Itself

I’m in a bathing suit, and people are laughing. Oh, this can’t be good.

The sun was a spotlight on the diving board. It must be twenty degrees hotter up here, I thought. My forehead was sweaty, and, come to think of it, so was everything else. I bent over. The image of Tiffany Chin skating her 1987 U.S. Nationals long program with a wedgie in her blue Lycra costume flitted through my head. I dug my toes into the nubby wet board and tried to get a grip on my own situation.

Do I have a wedgie? I don’t think so.

With my arms stretched overhead, I tucked my chin and swallowed at the same time, which made me want to cough. Don’t cough! Don’t fall in! The board was wobbling. Ergo, my thighs were wobbling. Great.

A line of teens jostled one another behind me.Were they watching me? I wasn’t sure. The water below looked cold and deep. I closed my eyes.

I’m almost forty years old. Lord, help me. I don’t know what I’m doing.

IN THE STORY of my life there are many times when I did not, literally or metaphorically, dive in. I was raised by Chinese immigrant parents who wanted my sister and me to excel in school, succeed in our careers. In my mind, that meant focusing on things I was good at (reading and writing, pioneer crafting) and avoiding areas where I might fall short (most everything else). I was not only afraid of failing, but I was afraid of the fear I would feel while trying not to fail. Afraid of feeling fear itself.

Diving into a swimming pool, with its associated risks of belly flops, drowning, and public humiliation, was something I had successfully avoided all my life. Until now.

My husband and I have two daughters, Gigi and Ruby. Gigi was eight years old and scared to jump off the diving board at camp. “Go ahead, try it, don’t worry what everyone else thinks, you’ll be fine!” I said, praying for her not to ask the obvious: “Mommy, do you dive?” Ruby, then three years old, was already asking why everyone in the family had a bike helmet but Mom. I wanted them to worry less and enjoy life more, to take risks and try new things. But I rarely sought to go out of my comfort zone myself.

In fact, given my nervous nature, my bookish upbringing, my midlife responsibilities, and my boundless propensity for tripping and falling and hurting myself, my comfort zone was less a zone and more a skittish zigzag from car to coffee shop to supermarket to office to sofa to fridge to bed, where I lay awake, worrying. The day I realized I wanted something more for my girls was the day I realized I had to do something more myself. And the day all our lives changed for the good.

I scheduled two diving lessons with my daughter’s swim coach, Jenny Javer. Zoe, an old college friend, had always wanted to learn how to dive and asked to join in. Jenny is exactly who you’d want by your side if your ship was on fire and you had to jump off the deck to save yourself. “A belly flop is like stubbing your toe—it hurts, but you get over it, right?” she said, instantly dispelling a lifelong fear for both Zoe and me. We were diving (that is, falling with style) from the side of the pool within a half hour; and by the end of the first lesson, she’d deemed us ready to try the diving board the next time.

Yet at the beginning of the second lesson, Zoe and I had lingered in the shade, meticulously applying sunscreen, as if a layer of SPF would protect us from all pain. We watched the teens lined up for the diving board push and shove and dare each other into ever more dangerous stunts. Do we have to do this? our expressions must have said loud and clear, because Jenny broke in: “Don’t think.”

The two of us, Chinese-American straight-A students for life, stood blinking at her, uncomprehending.

“You know what to do,” Jenny said, appealing to our knowledge base. “It’s the same as what you’ve done before, just a little higher. Come on now.”

It sounded so sensible on the ground. I tucked my hair into a ponytail, put one last smear of sunscreen on the back of my neck, and took my place in line. A few minutes later, and ten steps down the plank, I was suspended over the county pool, sweating through my Speedo. I’m on the diving board. This feels a lot higher up than it looks.

I took a deep breath, and dove in. With a big fat splash.

It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

Not only did Zoe and I survive, we became divers that day. Not only did we become divers that day, we got a new lease on life. If I can do this, something I never thought I could do . . . well, then anything is possible. I was captivated by how fears held for decades could be dispelled in a matter of minutes. How many of us are held back by fears that make our lives smaller than they need to be, fears that, before we know it, define who we are?

I started a blog about facing fears and trying new things in midlife, called Facing Forty Upside Down. I figured if I committed myself in writing, at least Gigi could follow along and hold me to my promises. I wasn’t sure if anyone else would read it. Everywhere I looked I saw confident, successful people. I wasn’t sure anyone else could relate.

It turned out I was far from alone. Friends from all phases of my life and around the world responded from cyberspace. New acquaintances and neighbors from around the corner pulled me aside at the coffee shop or the playground to tell me how afraid they were. Afraid to swim, to drive at night, to ride a chairlift. Afraid of getting hurt, of looking dumb, of growing old. Some were tentative by nature and nurture. Others remembered living exuberantly until a bad experience scarred them. Still others, spread thin by life’s responsibilities, no longer had the energy to shake things up. It struck me how universal the emotions were beneath the specific fears. It all boiled down to fear of pain, fear of rejection, fear of death, a sense of powerlessness. And the stranglehold these feelings had on us made us less than who we wanted to be.

Not that there was any lack of advice out there. The self-help section of any bookstore had lots of suggestions for how to face fear. Unfortunately, they all seemed to conflict. It doesn’t matter why you’re afraid, just do what you fear was one school of thought, while another cautioned, Stop, think, why are you afraid? It’s because of your brain, your genes, your upbringing, your chakras, your past lives, your diet, your pets or lack thereof. If you could focus on your future, if you could reframe your past, if you could just be in the present, all might be well.

There were books that profiled extraordinary heroes—jet pilots, prisoners of war, Olympic athletes, world leaders—stepping up to extreme challenges. There were books about putting life on hold for a spiritual quest, or doing Fear Factor–type challenges like skydiving or shark cage diving. I loved those stories. But how did they relate to my life? I was tempted to chuck it all and buy The New Encyclopedia of Flower Remedies.

And then it came to me.

I want to write a book about how ordinary people face everyday fears. About what motivates us, what keeps us going, what helps us most of all. About how our lives change when we become our best, bravest selves.

Of course, fear is a valuable self-protecting mechanism, so I left some life-preserving intuitive fears (snakes, lightning, blood, clowns, for example) well enough alone. But other common surmountable fears were fair game and I had a theory that different methods would be effective in different situations, so I cast a wide net. I joined Toastmasters and did ropes courses and self-defense classes and put myself in more ridiculous predicaments than I’d ever imagined. I wore helmets and harnesses, high heels and swimsuits (not at the same time), and over and over again, I looked at myself, thinking, I’m about to do something completely different now. And I loved every nerve-racking minute.

Along the way, I met so many inspiring people: a priest, a rabbi, and a swami; therapists; multiple swim coaches; and two car crash survivors. I heard about near-death experiences by plane and boat and hanging off a cable way above the ground. I saw shaking people step up to a mic and grown men pedal undersized bikes. I watched adults working with kids and discovered that who learned more from whom was entirely up for grabs. I encountered breakthroughs and setbacks and surprises I certainly didn’t see coming.

Every single person in this book opened my eyes in a different way, and collectively they showed me how much we are the same. For it’s not just fear we have in common but our endless capacity for joy.

What began as a challenge that I took on for the sake of my kids became a series of lessons in how to open my heart to the elements. The payoff—exhilaration, irrepressible laughter, gratitude, and lo! courage, too—is what I want to share with you.

You can face your fears. You can learn and grow. And you can have the time of your life doing it, too. You can go from being an armchair adventurer to the heroine of your own story, and you don’t need a personality transplant or a sudden windfall to do it. You don’t even need to do anything crazy (unless you discover, as I did, that you really kind of want to).

All you need is some nerve.

CHAPTER 1

THE UNEXPECTED

Boogie Boarding

Splash! The foam football, heavy with seawater, bonked my head on its way into the ocean, landing with a wet thud that kicked salt water into my eyes.

“Sorry, lady!” the tattooed man to my right called out. I was floating on my brand-new boogie board, just behind where the waves were breaking, and had been watching him and his friend play catch in the waist-high water for a while. They gradually drifted closer to me, until the ball was sailing over my head. Or into my head. It was the second time I’d been hit with it.

In the past, I might have assumed they, like the rest of the world, were out to get me. But not today. I was in a great mood today. I picked up the ball, wrung it out, and tossed it toward a blurry tattooed form, yelling cheerfully, “Your friend has lousy aim!” Blurry tattooed man number two, behind me, waved sheepishly.

“Do you think those guys are flirting with me?” I asked Barb, floating on her board a few feet away. “Or was I just the monkey in the middle?”

“They were definitely flirting with you,” Barb said. “No question.” She leaned her head back into the water.

“I love you, Barb.” I laughed. “You always know what to say.”

I sighed happily, touching the ocean floor with my feet, just to make sure it was there, before I let them float back up. This was no tropical vacation—we were at Jones Beach, that is to say, the Atlantic Ocean with a few million New Yorkers mixed in. The water was cold and brown, with objects I didn’t want to look too closely at drifting by. But still, it was bliss. I was here with my friend, stealing a few hours while the kids were in camp. I had just turned forty-one, and after more winters of discontent than I cared to think about, it was glorious summer and things were looking up.

Hazy sunshine soaked through the topmost layer of water. I hugged the warm board, feeling almost comfy enough to be lulled to sleep. I marveled for a moment at how relaxed I was. Me. Having fun. In moving water!

I have never enjoyed the sensation of being off my feet, and since an ill-fated tubing incident on the Esopus Creek—gosh, was it nearly twenty-five years ago?—being off my feet in fast-moving water that could drown me had long been off my list of how to have a good time.

The list wasn’t very long to begin with. Growing up, when my friends were out climbing trees and skinning knees, I was in the library reading about Laura Ingalls climbing trees and skinning knees. I guess you could say I was more of an armchair kid.

As I grew up, the list shrank. First there was the career to think of, and then the children. The real, and what felt like real, battles between life and death, success and failure, took every ounce of my energy. To my sleep-deprived brain it was all about conserving strength: If it didn’t haveto be done; if I didn’t know how; if it was too scary, too complicated, too inconvenient, too expensive, too time-consuming, too embarrassing, too cold, too hot, too wet, too icky; if I could get bit or dizzy or fall over; if it could hurt my bad back, bad neck, bad ankle; if it made me or my mother (or the mini-version of her I carry in my head) cluck and say, Why would you want to do that? it went by the wayside.

“Mommy doesn’t do that,” my kids would say—she doesn’t ski or sail or ride a bike. Mommy doesn’t play catch or do roller coasters or program the TV. She’s busy! She’s tired! She has Important Things to Do! If I had died in 2009, my headstone would probably have read: Mom: She Worried a Lot.

But then, I changed. So much that my husband is still searching the back of my neck for signs of alien abduction. Who can explain it?

Maybe it was turning forty and realizing that it wasn’t just days but decades slipping by in the same worn paths that somehow grew narrower with each foray. Maybe it was the sense among friends that as we got older we were becoming more like ourselves, but not in a good way. I love you, but didn’t we have the same conversation last week? Maybe it was the hypocrisy of stuffing my children into snowsuits and shin guards and helmets and sending them out into the fray while I cheered from a bench. Maybe it was a combination of all that and a last-gasp, premenopausal burst of hormones.

Whatever it was, after a lifetime of living nowhere near the edge, I had had enough. I started diving in.

The sounds of teenagers teasing and splashing each other and children screaming happily filled the air around me and Barb. This is what it feels like to be part of the fun, I thought, my own pleasure suddenly tinged with guilt. Gigi, my older daughter, loves the water, but I had avoided taking her to the beach for years, because I was so afraid. The last time I’d waded into waves with her, I squeezed her slippery little wrist so hard my own hand hurt. Ruby, my younger daughter, hated putting her face in the water at the pool; who even knew how she would take to the ocean? My own limitations had limited us all for so long.

It’s not too late. I’ll bring them to the beach before the summer is out.

My toes broke through the surface of the water and I wiggled them proudly. “My feet look like the feet of a CSI: Miami victim,” I said to Barb, pointing to the chipped polish.

“That means you’re having a good summer,” Barb said. I was having a good summer, a great one, in fact. I’d been to the pool countless times to prepare for this outing. I still had a panicky response underwater, where my go-to relaxation technique, deep breathing, remained singularly ineffective. Navigating moving water was a work in progress.

Barb rested her chin on her board, long brown hair fanning out around her. “Can you believe how far you’ve come? Do you remember the first time we did this?”

I certainly did.

IT’S PAINFUL EVEN TO think of now, how sad and lost I was when I first got to know Barb, just two years earlier. I’d stumbled into...