Fear Is An Addiction, Part Deux

A recent guest post about how fear is an addiction sparked quite a few comments.  A number of which argued that the author was either crazy, or naive.

I disagree.  Though we might not want to admit it in polite company, there is something addictive about fear.  About that combination of fear and adrenaline.  At least I've always thought so.

Then again, as they sing, what you fear in the night comes to call in the day, anyway.

I semi-sort-of lost it during the two months I spent in Khartoum on  a consultancy in 2008. A wee bit of paranoia; that feeling of being scared all the time.  Sometimes I think our ability to handle dangerous - or potentially dangerous - situations is finite, this well that you can only draw on for so long. And then eventually things that never bothered you before suddenly begin to loom rather fucking large.

The hard part - for me - is that I still really miss it; I miss Afghanistan, and I even miss Iraq, but it's the sort of missing that happens from the safety of my own apartment in San Francisco. I don't think I could do another six months in Iraq without losing - well, without losing something.

Yet it's not just missing that immediate feeling of excitement and adrenaline and fear; I miss how it made me think about myself, the way that living in those places let me create an entire self-image. And now for the past year and a half, ever since coming home, I've felt slightly at sea.

I used to complain that being overseas left me feeling untethered - from home, from family, from friends, from a concrete sort of existence. The irony being that even after coming home I still feel untethered, just in a different way.

A friend recently sent me Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn - and, as a general rule, any book written by a war correspondent who a) covered every conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and b) was briefly married to Hemmingway is definitely worth the read.

Anyway, I think she sums it up better than I ever could: "As a student of disaster, I note that we react alike to our tribulations: frayed and bitter at the time, proud afterwards. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival."

[Photo from zoriah.com]