When I google how to deal with a fear of death so bad that it takes away from daily life, what comes up are Psychology Today articles asserting that this fear often crops up as a major theme in middle age. The common wisdom is that fear of death exposes different, underlying fears, and the solution is to adjust your life so that it feels more meaningful. I have no other real fears, because I am willing to live through anything that isn’t dying. Maybe I laugh with Horn but land with Thiel for a gender-related reason. I’m not a man, but maybe I have the hubris of one.
ANTHONY STORR DEFINES THE GURUS he covers in Feet of Clay as inherently narcissistic. They become gurus, he writes, after experiencing a “dark night of the soul,” followed by an emerging dawn of insight. Storr argues that this process of chaos followed by insight is something shared by artists and creators. Many gurus, he writes, lead isolated childhoods with few friends—another commonality, besides an obsession with endings, that I share with them. The difference between gurus and artists, according to Storr, is that gurus find certainty and comfort in their insight, maintaining it through faith and delusion and by convincing others, while artists never reach that same level of internal or external certainty. So artists worry the world is getting worse and worse and maybe ending, and then we wonder if that fear is part of the human condition—or if it’s narcissistic, or a reasonable reaction to climate change, or an intense and dizzying mix of all of the above. The truth is that I fear death and endings, and I always will. I study believers, gurus, and religion because I’ll never be a believer myself. I crave certainty, but I’ll never find it; in a way that is more seeking and less Ozymandias, this fear will probably be the driving force behind much of my writing, and art, for the rest of my life.
The problem of death is a problem that feels both fundamental and unresolvable. Although I would be better off if the fear didn’t rule me, it most likely always will. The fear won’t save me from death, because death is inevitable. All I can hope is that I won’t die soon. All I can do is accept that I will sometimes be so afraid of dying that I take half an hour or an hour or a day off living, and then move on.
erika
ERIKA IS TURNING FORTY. She’s probably going to be really annoying about it on Twitter all year long. Something big usually happens to her every ten years. When she was nineteen, she finally started university. That really changed her life. When she was twenty-nine, turning thirty, she moved to Vancouver and started grad school. She doesn’t know exactly what form the change will take this time, but she feels like she has decisions to make about the next phase of her career.
Erika grew up in a townhouse in north Edmonton, not the worst part of north Edmonton. Erika was twelve when her family moved into the townhouse. She’d lived in Winnipeg until then. They moved to Edmonton because her mom couldn’t get work in Winnipeg and her dad wasn’t paying child support. When Erika thinks about Edmonton, she thinks about it in the summertime, so it’s all glow-y, in the way that the Prairies get. In the winter, it was pretty dire.
The townhouse was a three-bedroom with a basement, and her room was in the basement. Upstairs was her grandmother, her brother, her mom, and the bathroom. Erika’s room spanned half of the basement, but her room was also storage space. Her family never threw anything away. When she first moved in, she put up posters of Christian Bale and Christian Slater, but her TV was sort of her decoration. There were parts of her room that she didn’t have much control over. It was packed with furniture, it was messy, but it had a TV.
Erika didn’t feel comfortable at home. The townhouse felt crowded, because Erika and her brother were both getting older, and her mother’s mental health and her grandmother’s mental health weren’t great. Erika’s grandmother had had polio as a child, so she had a really hard time walking, and she didn’t leave her room very often. Her brother had rage issues. Erika tried to be out of the house as much as possible. In high school, she spent days at a time sleeping over at friends’ houses. In grade twelve, she had a friend move in with her. It was way too many people for that small house, but she does have warm memories of her mom making breakfast for them, or of having people over.
Erika has mostly dated men, but she’s always been attracted to women, and sometimes that expressed itself in the form of really super intense friendships, and sometimes in straight-up desire. Erika grew up in a really permissive atmosphere. Her closest uncle is gay. If she’d told her mom she’s bisexual, her mom probably wouldn’t have had any problem with it. But she’s never told her, just because she’s never really thought it was her mom’s business. Erika’s sexuality wasn’t the thing that made her need to get out of her house. It was her mom’s mental health issues, and her relationships with her mom and her brother.
When Erika was in grade twelve she got really heavily involved in chat culture, and fell in love with a boy on the internet. Erika remembers logging on to the internet for the first time. The sound it made. The first boy she corresponded with on the internet was a guy named Chris, in Dublin. They had long, late-night chats. He sent Erika a picture of himself, and it broke her email. She had to get her mom to call their internet service provider to purge the email from her inbox. Erika was really involved in the Sailor Moon fandom and had one of the first Sailor Moon fan websites. She also discovered cybersex, which made life in her small house very complicated. She had cybersex with girls, boys, everyone. It was fun. It was like writing a thousand collaborative, smutty sex novels. Sexuality was kind of in the background for Erika, but sex was very much in the foreground of her life.
Erika’s family didn’t have money for her to go to university, and she didn’t understand how student loans worked. She thought she couldn’t go to university, so she didn’t go to university. Instead, she went to Missouri to live with her internet boyfriend and his family. Her boyfriend wasn’t very much older than her. He was nineteen and she was seventeen. He paid for her to fly from Alberta to Missouri.
Erika remembers arriving at his house in Missouri. At first it was weird, because they were kids, and they’d made this bizarre decision. But she also remembers being relaxed for the first time in her life. She’d had a cat growing up, despite being deathly allergic to cats. When she got to Missouri and moved into her boyfriend’s mother’s house, she could breathe, literally and figuratively. Her first visit she was there for four months.
When she went back to Alberta, things with her family had gotten way worse. She ended up leaving again, and she and her boyfriend got an apartment together for six months. Erika left and came back, left and came back. Until her mother sold the house. In her memory, that time feels like it lasted ten years, but thinking back, it was a short and compact period of time. Erika’s boyfriend really wanted her to marry him. They got engaged at one point. He gave her a ring. And she was like, “Uhh, no.”
By mid-1999, Erika had figured out that she just needed her mom to sign a form for her to get a student loan. She enrolled, and she thought, Well, I’ll go to university and maybe see where this relationship goes after that. At university, Erika took a bus ride with her friend Jamie. She remembers it so clearly. They were sitting at the back of the bus, talking about whether Erika should break up with her boyfriend. She told Jamie that she was with the boyfriend in part because she was worried that no one else would ever love her, and Jamie looked at her and said, “Erika, that’s not a reason to be in a relationship.”
Erika had spent every minute that she wasn’t at high school online. That’s what connected her to her first boyfriend, and it’s also where she had a lot of transformational experiences, where she was able to express herself in ways that she wasn’t able to express herself outside of the internet, and make friendships with people who were just really kind and interested in the same things she was. The internet also allowed her to live outside of her body, and outside of the pressures of normative femininity that Erika felt in her day-to-day life. Erika cannot undersell how beautiful the internet was when it first started, when it first became really popular. It was a worldwide web of nerdy kids who couldn’t have good relationships, kicking off their shoes and diving into each other.