How to Be Afraid and Do It Anyway

In November 2021, I had the absolutely terrifying "pleasure" of telling a (Mainstage) Moth Story in front of a small, live audience.

Because I couldn't invite you to join in person, I'm bringing the story to you.

Below is a transcript, but if you'd like to listen, you can do that here: The Moth Player.

For those who are new to The Moth, a quick primer:

"TRUE STORIES, TOLD LIVE, NO NOTES."

"[The Moth] features a mix of national voices, including luminaries in the arts and sciences, newsmakers and news breakers, and everyday heroes (and even a few reformed villains!)... An ever-growing community where entertainment, enlightenment, and festivity merge comes to life on the historic stage for one magical night."

Moderator: Our next storyteller, when I asked her to tell us about a time that something stopped her dead in the tracks, she said the other day at the dog park, she saw a woman apply hand sanitizer to her dog's paws. [laughs] That’s very good. All right, please welcome Amanda Stern.

[applause]

Amanda: Since I was a child, I've been held captive by this nameless, invisible dread. The feeling was so all-encompassing it made routine things like coming and going feel like I was putting my life in danger.

It convinced me that if I wasn't watching her, my mom would die or disappear. I felt responsible for her safety. This made leaving her every single morning to go to school feel unbearable and leaving her to go to my dad's every other weekend feel like I was walking towards my own kidnapping.

The only way that I could alleviate my apprehension, calm myself down, and find relief was just to avoid the hard thing, and stay at home, with my mom, where I knew I would be safe.

Nobody knew what was wrong with me.

They called it homesickness, this feeling of mine, but I knew that couldn't be right because I felt it even when I was home. All I knew was that I felt defective and broken, and I secretly worried that I was crazy.

I didn't anticipate that the dread would grow as I grew and that I would bring it with me from childhood into adulthood. But that's exactly what happened.

The year is 1995. I'm 25 years old. I live in a small apartment with a shower in the kitchen. Alanis Morissette is my generation's current soundtrack.

I haven't left the apartment in three weeks. I don't have a job, so that's not a problem. I don't leave the house to see friends, or go to bars, or do anything a 25-year-old should do. When I get hungry, I order in, but I don't get hungry because I'm thinking of killing myself.

You see, now I'm an adult, but instead of my mother being the central thing around which my dread has organized itself, it's my apartment. My apartment has become my mother.

Only now, just the thought of leaving sends me to the bathroom to throw up. I worry that any small movement will set me off, so I stay as still as I possibly can.

But then, I worry that I'm running out of air. So, I race to the window, and I open it. But, as soon as I stick my head out, I can feel the dread in the wind rushing towards my face, trying to murder me, and I slam the window down and I race back to the bathroom to throw up.

But this doesn't stop me from worrying that I'm running out of air, so now and then I check. I open the apartment door, or I take a couple of steps out, but nope, nope, nope, I can feel that black cloth of dread waiting to drop over my head, pull me to a grave, and bury me alive in cement. I race back to my apartment, and I always end up throwing up in the bathroom.

I can't even have friends over because I'm so afraid they'll breathe all the available air and die from socializing.

I want a big life. I want to perform and be on stage. I want to write books and do readings from them. I want to host dinner parties and actually attend them. But how can I do any of this when I can't even be around people? The only way out, the only thing I can figure to do, is just to end my life.

It just makes the most logical sense. But before I do that, I need to know the name of the thing that wants me to kill myself, and I know the person who knows that is my mother.

I know that my mother has been keeping a secret from me. I know that she believes and knows that I'm crazy. But she somehow managed to keep it from me, to tell all my friends, and boyfriends, and teachers; she managed to tell everybody in my life that I would ever meet to keep this fact from me, to humor me. But I need to know.

I need to know the name of the thing that wants me dead. I call my mom. I tell her that I'm not doing well, and I tell her that I need to know what's wrong with me.

I need to know its name.

She says, “She doesn't know.” No one knows, and I tell her, “It's okay. I'm prepared. I'm ready. I'm actually calling you for this information. I need it. I'm ready. Give it to me. Tell me I'm crazy.”

But she won't do it. She denies it. She tells me that if I were crazy, she’d tell me. Totally don't believe that, but she says it. Anyway, she doesn't like the way that I sound. So, she tells me she's going to call a cab, and I should take it and come over to her house, which is five blocks away.

Now, the only thing that could actually get me out of my apartment would be the promise of being close to my mom. We don't even really get along that well at this point, but the umbilical cord between us has never been cut.

Being near her, I feel, will be just the thing to get me out of my house. So, I race down the hall, and down the stairs, and into this cab.

The second that I shut the door, I look at the lock on the cab, and I put my fingers in a V, and I place them on either side of the lock because I want to be ready for when the cab driver depresses the lock–because he's going to kidnap and murder me.

But I'll be fast, and I can flick the lock back up and race out of the cab. Now, even in my suicidal despair, I can see how absurd this is because here I am, wanting to kill myself, but I'm afraid this guy's going to do it for me?

Wouldn't I want him to kill me?

But the truth is, I don't want to die. I just don't want to feel like this anymore. If only I could feel differently if only I could not be filled with dread all the time, if only I could feel relief, and in that moment, my body somehow calls up the feeling that I want, and I can feel it across my chest, and it is so delicious. It's so perfectly perfect.

It gives me a third option.

Because the truth is, it's not the absence of feeling that I want. It's the presence of relief that I long for, and I know that the only way to feel this feeling, to fill my body with it, is to conquer my fear.

The only way to conquer my fear is to face it.

I understand in the back of that cab that the thing that is hardest for everyone in the world to do–which is to face your fear–actually feels easier and less exhausting to me than continuing to live my life the way that I've been living it.

So, that's it. That's what I decide. I am going to live my life facing my fears because I cannot continue to live my life beholden to all my terror. We pull up in front of my childhood home, and I remove my fingers from the lock, and I race inside with the promise of being close to my mom.

The next morning, my mom sends me to her therapist. I find myself sitting in front of him as he asks me for all my symptoms, and I tell him. He asks me how many weeks I've been feeling this way. I say I don't do that kind of math; I've been feeling this way a thousand weeks. I don’t know, since I was a baby.

He's shocked that I've gone this long without being diagnosed or treated, and he tells me that the name of my condition is a panic disorder. Only my panic disorder grew up, got married, and had babies, and now my body is home to five or six different anxiety disorders and clinical depression. He puts me on medication, I start seeing a therapist, and I slowly get better and better and better.

My 25-year-old self was right. Facing my fears is easier than avoiding them. Avoiding them gave my fears power, but facing them gives me power. Now, I can get in a cab and not be afraid he's going kidnap me. I can write books and do readings from them. I can have dinner parties and actually attend them.

I can be afraid and do it anyway because I know that facing my fears won't kill me.

But running from them almost did.

Thank you.

[applause]

Moderator: That’s Amanda Stern, everyone. Beautiful, beautiful. Man, what a beautiful line in there. It wasn't the absence of feeling that I needed, but it was the presence of relief.

And you? Have you ever been afraid and done it, anyway? Tell me about it in the comments.

Until next week, I will remain…

Amanda

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