Fear of Feeling
Days were going in a flash. Lately, life has been feeling like an express train, and I am merely a passenger. I was just twenty-two, and in a month, I will be twenty-three. It feels like a game where I have no control over the speed of the car; I can only steer while the car keeps getting faster with every checkpoint until I finally lose control of the steering and a game over sign pops up. It is not like I am living in auto-pilot mode. I remember the moments… till now atleast but I am unable to hit the brakes.
To regain some control and spend my time more wisely, I invented a rule. I call it "SelfCheck".
The rule is simple: I cannot pick up a digital device unless I know exactly why I am doing it. I wanted to break the habit of scrolling when I had nothing else to do. I believe it is better to do nothing sometimes, to just sit and be with yourself. Yet, my fingers still betray me from time to time. They navigate to Instagram or YouTube on their own, looking for a way to make time fly, fooling me into thinking I am busy when I am really just numb.
To save myself from this loop, I turned to a book I bought during a lunch break.
Our company recently shifted to a new location, a place surrounded by a grid of restaurants, bars, and cafes. While exploring the area after lunch, I found a small book peddler with stacks of novels. My eyes went straight to the Haruki Murakami stack. After reading Norwegian Wood and Men Without Women, I couldn’t help but become a fan. The emotions those books gave me and the deep relationship I built with those characters is still stuck with me. I kept eyeing the stack, while unspooling these streams of thoughts, until the peddler’s voice pulled me back to the present with a few more Murakami recommendations. It instantly triggered a smile on my face and a sense of respect for that guy in my heart. He wasn't just selling those books he was aware of them.
I bought a stack of them that day. They sat on my table for weeks as life kept speeding up.
Until today, when my hands were ready to betray me again, reaching for my phone blindly. Luckily a bell went off in my head: SelfCheck. I put the phone down, walked to my desk, when I saw those books I bought the other day and picked up one of the novels. I was excited to read another one of his novels but there was a vague sense of discomfort. I settled back into bed, running my fingers over the texture of the cover paper, a combination of matte backprint with glossy text.
I opened it. As usual, there was the standard introduction about the author. It was the same introduction as any other book from Murakami but I still began there just to set the pace, when suddenly after only reading a couple of lines, a blur of fear set in.
It wasn't a physical fear, but a memory of emotion. Flashbacks hit me, everything I felt reading his other works, and everything that was happening in my own life during those times. It was a "fear of feeling."
Humans usually love to feel. We ride rollercoasters for the thrill, watch horror movies to feel scared, or watch sports to feel rage and triumph. An emotion makes a task a thousand times better than a simple duty. That is why walking ten kilometers with a friend to buy a phone case is an adventure, while walking to the shop across the street for milk is a chore. The emotion is the driver.
But this fear was different. It wasn't the exciting fear of a horror movie; it was the fear of sadness. The fear of feeling separation, loneliness, and being lost. All of this came from turning a single page.
While I am sitting in my speeding car the emotions are the traffic, the weather, and the scenery surrounding it. Even though I have no control over them, they still end up being the biggest drivers of what road I choose. There are those times, when the weather is not that pleasing, the scenery has bad memories, and the traffic sets an immovable trap at a place I wanna run away from. We as humans want to avoid these feelings, in fact I believe with enough efforts we can avoid every feeling. We can clear the road of traffic, remove the scenery, and mute the weather. But that would leave us driving on an empty, straight road with monotonous scenery and no color.