The way I change my relationship with fear helps me survive during the quarantine.
The act of finding blessings in the curse of pandemic seems ignorant and unsparing in regard to all the misfortunes, but how if it’s a helpful way to keep us survive?
My old relationship with fear was problematic. I was so merged with my own fear. I engaged in a contentious coping mechanism that exploited the burden of fear just to bury myself in the pile of misery. Right, I was the miserable one, a person who enjoyed immersing herself in self-pity and took every trepidation as a chance to glorify her emotional disability. In my view by the time, fear held the biggest responsibility for the incessant unhappiness, anxiety, and failure I had to suffer.
Every time I caught out in a situation that provided a surge of dread growing in my gut, I was in distraught agitated with intricate mental conflicts. Living with that distorted mental state, it was irrefutable that I didn’t have the ability to manage my own fear, let alone eliminate it. I fell prey to the vague perception, I thought everyone — which the majority of the people I knew — who was so brave and inclined with confidence were never fully aware of their own fear or refused to acknowledge the terror inside them. Alienated from the normalcy, I later constructed a hyper-vigilant behavior that dismissed the empathy afforded by the people around me. Not only did fear torture and wreck my mental nerves, but fear also estranged me to the rest of the world.
Everything that has the means of threatening our physical and psychological safety can be the main source of fear. The year 2020 is notoriously recognizable as the worst year ever in history. Massive flood disasters around Jakarta and its circulated cities opened this year horribly. To the world, the glaring wildfires in Australia forests almost eradicated half of its vegetation and fauna population. Before that, the world was on the brink of World War III. If seeing the fatal strike that heated up the political conflict, the insinuation of war possibly could occur in ticking time. Yet, the biggest threat that is eventually shattering the world right now in fact already loitered from early December in 2019. As we just started figuring out what happened with us in the first place, the population of the world now is facing the same fear of the Covid-19 pandemic.
After being sequestered in social distancing and the bigger scale version of it, over the course of the 3 months increasing trend on the positive case curve, we’re now reaching to what the government boastingly promotes — even without holding a strong basis of fact, did anyone witness the curve trend get flattened lately? — as the moment of transition. Indonesia is one of the countries that stand in full encouragement to practice new normal. Hail hath New Zealand proudly claimed it with zero positive cases in a week. Meanwhile, Indonesia is still counting in reverse with the daily positive case data that projects the actual infection cases for the two weeks before.
Never have I seen the government so determined and optimistic like this, not in a way like they can conquer the virus in long run and ensure that people will be safe by providing an inclusive and adequate public health care system. The government looks remarkably brazen because they have come to the no brainer conclusion: put their citizen in what choice they would prefer, whether to be killed by the virus or by poverty.
Oh, Boi nothing is less ironic than when your government is willing to risk your life in order to avoid economic breakdown because if they finally fall apart, they can not afford to pull out the pieces back together. That being said, it is one solid example of someone living in denial of their own suffering and willing to let them captive by their own fear. Consequently, it just reveals the other two and three deeper layers of what kind of uncertainty we will face upon.
The type of fear that derives from this pandemic breeds in multiple forms. First, we’re afraid to be infected or even dying, but we are more frightened to cause pain for others by infecting the loved ones. Soon when the fear proliferates, we will unable to grasp the actual reality. Human is necessary inside the weakest figure if they have to live hand-in-hand with something outside their own control.
We grow up with the idea that everything can be arranged and synchronized in the right pattern since we have the capability to master things we find instinctively engaging. We take this idea of perfection into adulthood, at some point it shapes the way we survive from day to day life, simultaneously it embeds on the way of us chasing success. All the things that earn victory should bolster up with well-prepared efforts and impeccable strategy as if the future is only arching in the familiar trajectory. Therefore, coexisting with uncertainty is not something we are eager to compensate, let alone keen to accept. Even living in confinement is already challenging; how about adding the extra salt to the open wound with something overpowers our skill as the great grand planner, something we cannot concisely predict.
As a result, some of us caught out with the incessant storm of unreliable information about this new disease. In fact, new science requires long-term and rigorous clinical trials that take years to become trusted knowledge. In those periods of waiting, our body starts developing the sign of an “infodemic” disorder. The adrenal glands start to pump up: increasing the heartbeat rapidly, raising the blood pressure, and slowing down the digestion system. Until cortisol, the stress hormone, is ready to block out the prefrontal part of the brain narrowing our focus and we soon feel unease, helpless, and frustrated.
Once the discomfort reached the pitch, we experience the cognitive dissonance to counter something surreal and unfamiliar. We become easily manipulated by prejudice instead of proven fact. We intend to satisfy our confirmation bias rather than receive the unfixed information with the open arms. That’s why some of us seem terrified with all the things related to the world-leading power and smitten by conspiracy theory. It’s the form of our defense mechanism when we are dealing with uncertainty. Sometimes the easy way to make sense all of these is to follow the simplest structure of thinking, otherwise — the critical one — requires more complex knowledge transference in brain path.
What comes to wonder is why we always want to set everything under control. We obviously know it’s an impossible task, but we keep managing everything on board to be served delicately on the table as perfect as possible. Why do we put such a high demand toward ourselves? Needless to say, the world alone manifesting in social convention already demands a high degree of self-control and rationality on us.
However, I always suspect that we also voluntarily live in suffering in order to keep the appointed happiness at the end. As it has been said too often, that we need to endure in long-span suffering before we can achieve successful outcomes. My own track record subscribing to this idea was somewhere between painful and disheartened. The notion of idealism only nurtured fear of mistake when it applied to me. It is likewise when you put all your attention on perfection, the next thing you do is only focusing on everything that’s wrong. It led me back to the vicious cycle of self-deprivation, if I did not suffer enough subsequently I talked negatively to myself, loudly. On the face of it, I tried to change a better coping strategy that can draw me close to the fairer mindset.
Since the beginning of this year, I’ve drawn a commitment to myself to practice mindfulness regularly. My start point was small, actually, I preferred to keep it in the light sense instead of being cajoled intensely that would end up put me on the edge of quitting, so I just need to utilize being mindful as a new mental habit as constantly as I can.
Practicing mindfulness apparently requires you to withdraw from the world’s demand and get the courage to countenance the hard truth. To recite what Bhante Gunaratana describes in his book, Mindfulness in Plain English, the purpose of being mindful is the act of building awareness. Being mindful means we suppose to see things in clear wisdom as in its the most natural form without any judgments or biases. Including how we value imperfection, failure, negative emotion, and fear. Without adding too much endorsement to this form of practice, mindfulness actually transforms the course of my life for the past 6 months. It’s indeed the better way to look at the world, even in the most difficult situation like now.
In the first phase of practicing mindfulness, I was in the process to build a new relationship with my own fear. The kind of reciprocal relationship based on the attentiveness and respect of each other’s presence.
From the early period of our childhood, we’ve been told to get rid the negative emotion of as far as we could because it is something labeled as bad for us. Growing up, we arrive in the culture that forces us to avoid pain or other things that could make us feel discomfort or to pretend as if it has never been there. This convention certainly doesn’t derive from a vacuum or a personal-scale room instead it’s a systemic culture that implores us to fight against our own experience. Every time you’re trying to run away from negative emotion you actually feel, your brain is being trained to see it as a threat. The more frequent you repel it, the more your brain teach you to be afraid to feel it. As you can predict, you will get back attacking your core being, telling yourself that you’re not tough enough yet, and eventually collapsing into the same state of self-disgust.
By practicing mindfulness continuously, I can withdraw from this “passive ego trap” gradually. Since I manage to perceive negative emotion mindfully without the intervention of my debase preconception about how fear can affect me, just simply allowing fear to be there having a safe place in the mental state, I finally can embrace fear as its purest form.
During this pandemic, some progressive media have tried so hard to mitigate the situation by composing sentences that prevent triggering fear to the public. Well, it’s technically quite helpful to assuage the paranoia, but the act of rejecting fear itself is actually against the natural mechanism of the way our brain processing emotion. No matter how sugar coating and soft-spoken the tone of the news is, we simply can’t deny that human is the vulnerable creature that always motivated by anxiety, unconscious compulsion, and fear. Even through our own hemisphere, we can not control certain things entirely, especially when it involves the basic intuition that conjures genuine emotion like fear. In this context, the existence of fear is essential to let us be alert with the source of the actual danger which is the virus and the way it transmits amongst people.
Fear and other negative emotion like sadness and disappointment are unavoidable. The wisdom mindfulness tells me is I can simply see fear as a part of reality and acknowledge it with good grace rather than suffer from it. We are indeed a wounded creature who constantly has to cope with undue disappointment and hideous monster in our mind, but you can choose between beating yourself up or helping yourself on ease.
In the wake of this difficult situation, I’m aware that I keep cultivating resourceful insights from this new mental habit. And the act of developing consciousness from being mindful not only lessen the psychological adversity but also includes the additional rewards that flourish me with generosity. As time passed by, practicing to regain awareness in the difficult situation will extend to nourish the sense of adequacy because you maintain to mindfully accept things as the way it should be.
After I advanced the first stage of embracing the presence of the fear, not long enough for me to realize that there are still many roadblocks covering each part of the whole journey to reconcile with all the shortcomings in this pandemic. Just relying on the process of acceptance perhaps would get us to overlook the actual affair we’ve been dealing with. Thereby, it’s also important to redirect the awareness back to the source of the fear and follow the growing pattern all along. What I mean is that I need to continuously update my knowledge about the Covid-19 pandemic in order to have the future projection, hence I can prepare to overcome the worst cost it would take our life into, to develop forward-thinking action because we should not rely on the short-term crisis management, we need to be acquired by a long-term solution.
For this particular matter, actually I’m kind of got the help on my back. My day to day job requires to keep me on the track with the developing study about the virus. From bits by bits learning, far before the buzzing phrase of “new normal” recited, I was a little earlier to acknowledge the longevity the virus has that potentially can afflict our life further in the future. So, I was a bit astounded to find many people still bear themselves as if the old normal life still exists. Longing in the hope of magic bullet invention as the quick-fixed solution to eradicate the virus, while scientists alone overtly confine in the perception of combating new disease requires a long-range of thinking and sustained efforts.
We might long for a dose of relief, but even if the vaccine successfully arrives next year, by the record it never holds the promise of securing our life to be 100% percent free from the risk of the disease. Since two centuries ago the first vaccine invented, there has been merely one disease vanquished from the earth. Smallpox eradication is still an unprecedented achievement in the medical science field.
Although it perhaps counterintuitive, this kind of far-fetched look is not an extreme butthurt manner to convert yourself to nihilism. To enhance your understanding of the source of fear means a better way to embrace the presence of the fear within the whole subsequent impact.
To arrive at this conclusion is clearly not a straight-way thinking process that has a thick finish line. Regardless of obtaining a more stable mental state, I was apparently enclosed by the other form of fear. I was afraid to admit in the first place that I’m so composed handling myself in this difficult situation because of the new mental habit practice. I was afraid to own that I earn so many blessings in the curse of the pandemic. If I come to sign myself up to feel okay in the middle of this maelstrom, I would feel that I already lost the sympathy off and commit to act ignorantly toward all the misfortunes that are occurring during this pandemic.
Honestly, I was far more afraid to receive a harsh judgment at the expense of owning it, accordingly living in the so-woke-up cyber society is not necessarily allowing you to feel okay about yourself. You as the person with privileges should not rest in the parade, you are pushed to keep hustling in the wheel of life instead, so you finally can legitimize that privileges. You’ve never been the best because what the society asks you for is to always be better.
But, if the world requests me to keep the wheel of life on the spin, shouldn’t I need to be survived first? And to survive in this situation, it requires some forms of strategy, an effective trick that able to hold the absence and the presence at once rather than letting one obscure the other by refusing any form of emotion we actually feel. Professing this notion means: doing the best as you can to survive in this situation is not a way to downplay other’s people’s hardship. It is a different act from pretending people outside not dying or denying the economy is not collapsing. To survive by staying as pleasing as healthy as we can is something that we are expected or supposedly do in order to mitigate the situation, to shrink the curve flattened.
Despite the risk of severe symptoms, the infection of the virus relatively benign to people who are in the mid-’20s like me. In fact, people who infected or haven’t been infected will be dealing with the recovery process of trauma caused by the pandemic. Therefore, depression and anxiety disorder might not be a temporary problem that will eventually disappear along with the virus. To keep survive and prevent getting infected by the virus, you do not only have to stick to the 20-second rule of handwashing with soap, or wearing a mask while you’re outside, or keeping the distance when you interact, you also need to stay in the most healthy mental state as plausible as you can.
