THE UNGOVERNABILITY OF THE BODY
The ungovernability of the body is fear in the bones. And I’m not referring here to the defense mechanism that protects us. I’m talking about the other one, the one thar paralyzes us and doesn’t let us breathe.
It enters the body like a squatter. Suddenly, because it’s always sudden, it becomes the most important thing we have, it becomes for a moment what we are. It emerges like a tsunami when we are at the supermarket, at our desks, at the university, or on a crowded street. It doesn’t care about what we’re doing, who we are with or if that meeting we’re about to have is gonna change our lives.
I always hear people say that the sky is always blue, that the sun rises again, that everything will be fine. They are right, but no one talks about the darkness also returning; no one speaks about what is there when there is no sun.
The darkness in the body is the loss of reason in the face of the threat of fear that crushes us like an internal terrorist.
Fear turns us into pessimists, makes us fascists. It makes us fearful of fear and, by extension, of our own existence because it inhabits us,
It’s a moment that turns us into trembling beings, makes us unpredictable, escapists; it turns us into experts in the art of making excuses: I arrived at class and didn’t feel like going in, I arrived at class but regretted it and went to a friend’s place instead. No. I arrived at class, and I couldn’t enter the classroom because I couldn’t stop shaking.
A few weeks ago, I went to see "La reina del miedo” at the cinema, and two minutes after it started, my best friend said ‘it’s you’. I laughed, nodded, and watched the rest of the movie thinking about myself.
Fear bursts in, pierces the floor, and makes you lose the ability to react. I always thought I could control it, that it wouldn’t happen to me because I knew what it was, what it meant. But I couldn’t, and I shattered into a thousand pieces on a staircase at my university, and everyone who spoke to me did so through glass and at full volume, because fear makes you see the scene from a different perspective.
It’s a set of questions you ask yourself over and over and are unable to answer: why with all the psychoanalysis I have, is this happening to me? is one. The other is, will it happen forever? Is this a new way of living that we’ll have to get used to?
Someone told me that writing wasn’t my thing. Don’t dedicate yourself to that; it won’t pay off, you’re not good enough. I can’t blame all my woes on that because it wouldn’t be fair. But I couldn’t help thinking at that moment that maybe they were right. Suddenly, everything I knew became blurry. I wanted to write something on my phone because writing saves me, but my hands were shaking. The idea of writing woke me up on the night I couldn’t move, but the thought of not doing it made me cry silently.
We don’t talk enough about fear because it makes us uncomfortable. Fear seeks, finds and locks us in; that’s why we are escapists. I would love to escape from this page and write something else that doesn’t make me tremble because I think writing something has never been so challenging for me, I’ve never exposed myself in this way, but I think if I don’t write it, I will remain suspended. If I don’t write this, I won’t be able to write anything else, and I can’t not write.
Fear suspends us and changes us. Just like sadness doesn’t allow us to be the same again, the same happens with fear. One always remembers the day they were afraid, the day they couldn’t enter, the day they ran away. And they are acutely aware that just as it came and went, it can return.
I know that feeling this is not the most normal thing in the world, but I also know it can happen. Feeling like you’re going to die when there’s no apparent danger is something that only those who have felt it can truly understand. But it’s not fear of death. It 's fear of fear.
Fear is imagination; it’s not something concrete. It’s an endless list of things that are already happening in our minds. Fear is that life derails and never returns to normalcy based on a comment.
“La reina del miedo” reflects it perfectly. No one knows what she fears, but she fears something. How she says goodbye, how she hugs, how she calls an angry friend, how she reacts to an unfamiliar noise, how she talks to her gardener, how she cries in public, and how, despite being surrounded by people, she feels she’s not where she should be.
I write a lot of things I’ve been thinking but find it hard to say out loud. Some I think of now, others I thought of before. Some I felt at some point, and others I feel now while listening to the horns outside, and everything sounds much louder. Some only my therapist knows. Others I just discovered.
I’m writing now because I believe that to understand, you must first feel.
There’s a song by Regina Spektor that says people are just people and shouldn’t make you nervous, that we think the world is ending but it’s not, that we see people with mixed characteristics but they’re still people, and maye to prevent all this from happening, we should stop drinking so much coffee and never watch the nine o’clock news.
The carousel doesn’t stop spinning. No one prepares us for fear, nor for death, nor for sadness, nor for life.
Perhaps feeling and understanding fear means recognizing that everyone has their own timing. That the subject will be there next Monday for me to attend, that a date can influence our lives more than we would like, that no matter how many years pass since the death of a father, you always miss them, and it’s not about hating fear because its the state terrorism we build ourselves, cutting off our breath in the safest corner of the world.
It’s about not fighting, not trying to win, although we hate losing because at the end of the day, we always win: every time fear leaves, we win, but in the meantime, we have to let it be. It’s about thinking of something else, going to another place while the tremor passes.
The ungovernability of the body is fear in the bones. And I’m not referring here to the defense mechanism that protects us. I’m talking about the other one, the one thar paralyzes us and doesn’t let us breathe.
It enters the body like a squatter. Suddenly, because it’s always sudden, it becomes the most important thing we have, it becomes for a moment what we are. It emerges like a tsunami when we are at the supermarket, at our desks, at the university, or on a crowded street. It doesn’t care about what we’re doing, who we are with or if that meeting we’re about to have is gonna change our lives.
I always hear people say that the sky is always blue, that the sun rises again, that everything will be fine. They are right, but no one talks about the darkness also returning; no one speaks about what is there when there is no sun.
The darkness in the body is the loss of reason in the face of the threat of fear that crushes us like an internal terrorist.
Fear turns us into pessimists, makes us fascists. It makes us fearful of fear and, by extension, of our own existence because it inhabits us,
It’s a moment that turns us into trembling beings, makes us unpredictable, escapists; it turns us into experts in the art of making excuses: I arrived at class and didn’t feel like going in, I arrived at class but regretted it and went to a friend’s place instead. No. I arrived at class, and I couldn’t enter the classroom because I couldn’t stop shaking.
A few weeks ago, I went to see "La reina del miedo” at the cinema, and two minutes after it started, my best friend said ‘it’s you’. I laughed, nodded, and watched the rest of the movie thinking about myself.
Fear bursts in, pierces the floor, and makes you lose the ability to react. I always thought I could control it, that it wouldn’t happen to me because I knew what it was, what it meant. But I couldn’t, and I shattered into a thousand pieces on a staircase at my university, and everyone who spoke to me did so through glass and at full volume, because fear makes you see the scene from a different perspective.
It’s a set of questions you ask yourself over and over and are unable to answer: why with all the psychoanalysis I have, is this happening to me? is one. The other is, will it happen forever? Is this a new way of living that we’ll have to get used to?
Someone told me that writing wasn’t my thing. Don’t dedicate yourself to that; it won’t pay off, you’re not good enough. I can’t blame all my woes on that because it wouldn’t be fair. But I couldn’t help thinking at that moment that maybe they were right. Suddenly, everything I knew became blurry. I wanted to write something on my phone because writing saves me, but my hands were shaking. The idea of writing woke me up on the night I couldn’t move, but the thought of not doing it made me cry silently.
We don’t talk enough about fear because it makes us uncomfortable. Fear seeks, finds and locks us in; that’s why we are escapists. I would love to escape from this page and write something else that doesn’t make me tremble because I think writing something has never been so challenging for me, I’ve never exposed myself in this way, but I think if I don’t write it, I will remain suspended. If I don’t write this, I won’t be able to write anything else, and I can’t not write.
Fear suspends us and changes us. Just like sadness doesn’t allow us to be the same again, the same happens with fear. One always remembers the day they were afraid, the day they couldn’t enter, the day they ran away. And they are acutely aware that just as it came and went, it can return.
I know that feeling this is not the most normal thing in the world, but I also know it can happen. Feeling like you’re going to die when there’s no apparent danger is something that only those who have felt it can truly understand. But it’s not fear of death. It 's fear of fear.
Fear is imagination; it’s not something concrete. It’s an endless list of things that are already happening in our minds. Fear is that life derails and never returns to normalcy based on a comment.
“La reina del miedo” reflects it perfectly. No one knows what she fears, but she fears something. How she says goodbye, how she hugs, how she calls an angry friend, how she reacts to an unfamiliar noise, how she talks to her gardener, how she cries in public, and how, despite being surrounded by people, she feels she’s not where she should be.
I write a lot of things I’ve been thinking but find it hard to say out loud. Some I think of now, others I thought of before. Some I felt at some point, and others I feel now while listening to the horns outside, and everything sounds much louder. Some only my therapist knows. Others I just discovered.
I’m writing now because I believe that to understand, you must first feel.
There’s a song by Regina Spektor that says people are just people and shouldn’t make you nervous, that we think the world is ending but it’s not, that we see people with mixed characteristics but they’re still people, and maye to prevent all this from happening, we should stop drinking so much coffee and never watch the nine o’clock news.
The carousel doesn’t stop spinning. No one prepares us for fear, nor for death, nor for sadness, nor for life.
Perhaps feeling and understanding fear means recognizing that everyone has their own timing. That the subject will be there next Monday for me to attend, that a date can influence our lives more than we would like, that no matter how many years pass since the death of a father, you always miss them, and it’s not about hating fear because its the state terrorism we build ourselves, cutting off our breath in the safest corner of the world.
It’s about not fighting, not trying to win, although we hate losing because at the end of the day, we always win: every time fear leaves, we win, but in the meantime, we have to let it be. It’s about thinking of something else, going to another place while the tremor passes.
Fear abstracts us from the world we know and takes us to another one in ruins, black and white. It contracts our body, weakens us, corrupts us, twists us, and throws us to a floor that is hard to get up from.
In the middle of a night of fear, they were showing “Kamchatka” on TV, which breaks your heart into a thousand pieces but talks about resistance. Kamchatka is the place where you resist.
I don’t know where I go when I’m afraid. I don’t know if I’ll ever know, but I’m clear that it can come back, and that terrifies me. What I do know is where I come back to. I return to writing, which is my Kamchatka. My place to resist.
In the middle of a night of fear, they were showing “Kamchatka” on TV, which breaks your heart into a thousand pieces but talks about resistance. Kamchatka is the place where you resist.
I don’t know where I go when I’m afraid. I don’t know if I’ll ever know, but I’m clear that it can come back, and that terrifies me. What I do know is where I come back to. I return to writing, which is my Kamchatka. My place to resist.
