on fear and back roads and what once was scary but now is not

This past weekend I was driving in the dark down some Virginia backroads.

The dark in rural Virginia feels way more dark than the dark in South Carolina.

There aren’t street lights or lamps or houses very close to the road.  Neighborhoods aren’t dotting the path and the night seems more dark somehow.

Driving the rural roads this weekend reminded me of driving those same familiar roads twenty years earlier.  And twenty-five years earlier.

And I could remember with painful clarity a feeling I used to have when driving those roads home from work – alone – late at night – on my way back to the farm.

Or driving those two-laned routes on my way home from a basketball game in high school.  By myself.

The same feeling.  It rushed back as quickly and as instinctively to my mind as my hands knew exactly when to turn and which tobacco barn was a landmark despite not having traversed routinely on these roads for years.

I remember fear.

The kind of fear I could taste like metal in my mouth.

The kind of fear that would find me singing the chorus of a praise song over and over on repeat out loud to try to just keep The Crazy at bay.

The driving too fast because I wanted the dark nighttime driving to be finished.  The rolling through stop signs for fear of having a stopped vehicle.  The eyes continually on the rearview mirror to see if headlights from other drivers behind me could be spotted.

I was legitimately afraid.

It sounds foolish now – it really truly does.  Very foolish and weak and embarrassing.

But it was still true.

I was terrified.

I don’t know why exactly or what entirely caused the fears to begin.

But I kind of do – and that’s shameful too.

I think I was afraid of someone kidnapping me.  (My mother was a woman who lived in fear of the dark.  Fear of driving alone.  Fear of All That Could Happen.  She passed that trait right on down to me, hand in hand with the shape of her eyes came this hereditary fear.  She was always warning me of All The Bad That Could Go Wrong When You Are Alone.)

I was afraid of a person pulling me over and stopping my car.  Hurting me.

I was afraid for myself and for my life.  Of all the Unknown.  Of all the evil that lurked.  Of all the bad that people kept hidden in their hearts.

And it’s a funny thing –

fear.

The way it changes you.

The way you change.

Last weekend I was driving those roads

and I felt so much less afraid.

My brain raced back to remember the familiar fear but my heart didn’t stay there.  As the roads curved and the landmarks passed – the one lane bridge, the strawberry fields, the dilapidated trailer – I thought about my fears and the manner in which they controlled me in those days.

And I thought about why the dark back roads with no lights and no cell service and no safety net didn’t frighten me any longer.

The lanes haven’t become more populated.  Verizon hasn’t infiltrated that area yet.  My car isn’t any more secure.

I think it is this:

I am so much less afraid because so many deeply scary things have actually happened in real life.

I’m not the girl with So Much To Fear and So Much Unknown.  I’m not the newlywed with Thoughts All Aglow and the idea that life was going to be kind of especially perfect for me.

The monsters have really appeared – less like the imagined menacing driver who followed too closely behind my car and more like the death of all that I thought to be accurate.

Now I don’t fear the same things.

I am no longer afraid in the same way.

It’s odd and a little tricky to wrap language around, but once the worst has actually happened – or pieces of the worst –

your fear changes.

I’ve seen fear.  I’ve lived fear.

Fear much worse than the metallic tasting variety in my mouth.   Fear like the real kind I’ve endured in the living room when I told the kids their daddy wasn’t coming home.

I’ve known fear.

Fear like hearing the medical diagnosis of those you love – your family, your people.  The cancer that seems to have teeth and a vendetta.

Fear like the facts stacking up straight and high and abundantly out of your control.

And suddenly, driving on a back road just isn’t so scary any longer.