life without terror

with thanks to the circle of Jeanne Geiger's CEG

Sep 02, 2024

This week I share a piece I wrote for Jeanne Geiger’s Creative Expression Group (CEG), formerly known as Writer’s Group. I’m likely to revise this and submit it for publication at some point, so I’ll be curious to hear insights/feedback from you literary-minded muses! I offer enormous gratitude for the beauty, wisdom, and commitment to healing I receive each week with my CEG muses. I’m also grateful to the muses named (only by their first initials) in this piece for sharing their stories with me. Thanks for inspiring and for witnessing my unfolding.

Life without terror.

Hannah Lynn Mell

1. Fear is an evolutionary adaptation, right? Like, the people who learned to be afraid of tigers and snakes survived to pass on their genetic code. But terror comes from a Latin root that means to tremble.M inventories her emotional baggage and declares terror the least valuable accoutrement. What’s the point in being so scared you’re shaking? Only the terrorist wins if they’ve left you unable to function. The other women in our circle nod heads in agreement. And I wonder, Does every woman know the feeling of terror?

2. Rewind the clock to my freshman year of college, when I walk three miles each way down sleepy suburban streets to Chili’s Bar & Grill, where I serve fajitas and beers and feel proud that I’m making twice what I would have made in a work study job on campus. One night I dream of a car gliding next to me in the dark and a large man pulling me in. I wake sweaty and trembling in my dorm bunk. Only a nightmare. I share the dream with my boyfriend and the next night he drives to Chili’s from his own college campus, 20 miles away, to make sure I’m safe. Twenty-five years later I wonder: Was it a random nightmare? Does every woman dream this at some point? Or did my psyche pick up on some sort of cosmic warning that could only be relayed through terror?

3. A nightmare is not an actual trauma. Dreaming of rape is not rape, but probably every person in a female body remembers the confluence of delight and dread that hits in adolescence: the realization that femininity is equal parts power and vulnerability, that a woman’s body is an accident waiting to happen. Please, pretty please, let it be a happy accident.

4. Not only female bodies are subject to terror, of course: black bodies, brown bodies, disabled bodies, queer bodies, transgender bodies. L tells me about walking through Boston in her voluptuous Puerto Rican body with J in his Black body, tells me how glad they were when they met a middle-aged White man in a suit who was walking to the same concert, how safe they suddenly felt.

5. So I wonder, Is it White male bodies that are exempt from terror? But R – White, male, upper middle class – tells me that as a child he lay awake at night, overcome with existential terror, the Impossibility of the Universe. None of it should exist, mathematically speaking, and yet it does. At 60, he’s mostly over the terror, but sometimes it still leaves him shaky and adrift in currents of sleeplessness.

6. Rewind the clock a second time, to my own experience of childhood terror, the recurring nightmare that woke me sobbing and shaking and calling for mommy. In the iteration I remember most clearly, we are waiting for a ride at Disneyland. I hold my baby brother Ben over a planter of flowers and as he slips from my arms the pink impatiens turn to thick thorns. In these dreams, Ben always dies, and it’s my fault. In waking hours, I was Mama’s Helper, the lauded Big Sister, but in sleep I knew how precarious Life is, how easily it all can slip away.

7. I ask D to tell me the times he has felt terrified. He tilts his head to one side. “I’ve had moments when I’ve thought This may have been a mistake that maybe bordered on terror, but nothing specific comes to mind.” He’s talking about boyhood pranks, I guess, or maybe the time he climbed atop the roof for home improvement reconnaissance. Maybe if his skin wasn’t white, maybe if he wasn’t raised in an idyllic farm town by parents who mostly avoided inflicting psychological damage, maybe if he didn’t look so much like Captain America, he would understand terror.

8. Scrutinizing D’s chiseled jaw line and peaceful gaze, the clock rewinds unexpectedly: I flash back to my single memory of waking terror. I’d stuffed it way down, but looking into those eyes brings it streaming back.

9. Central gathering room of Bay Ridge psychiatric inpatient ward, Lynn, Massachusetts, 23^rd of December 2017. D is visiting and it’s the day I am convinced I am in hell. I’m looking into these kind, steady eyes, and I want nothing more than to tell him to leave, to get out, to run for his life, but I know they’re watching. Terror = the bone-deep certainty that I’m fucked + the desire for him to comfort me + the conviction that if I smile and choke back my tears I will hasten his escape.

10. And now I’m wondering why the hell I felt the need to protect this paragon of privilege, this Prince Charming who never felt terror a day in his life. How long has this dance been going on, how long has the female body been trained to sacrifice itself for the male body? At best the male body expresses appreciation; on average it demands more and more forever more; at worst it terrorizes and destroys the female body and calls it love.

11. Rewind the clock way back this time, take me deeper into the story, show me the root of this imbalance. Are we back to the garden? Fashioned from a rib of Adam, Eve was born to the Planet knowing she was part of it all, but he had been so lonely before she came. It is not good for the man to be alone, God said. Is that the terror of a powerful male body, the span of solitude between his own genesis and the creation of his perfect helper?

12. Or perhaps it was the matter of the tree. The beautiful serpent spoke to Eve first, offered her the first taste of the fruit. When you’re fashioned from your lover’s rib, surely you feel like you can never be lost to the other, surely you are free to be curious, surely you’d look into the serpent’s eyes and say, Tell me everything.

13. But Adam lost his rib to make her, so maybe when he looks at her he can’t help feeling like he’s missing something, can’t help wishing the serpent had come to him first, can’t help blaming her even though he gobbled up the same temptation.

14. Enough. Take me back to my circle of women. Take me back to the precariousness that comes post paradise, to the tenderness of each companion who has tasted terror. The bodies I admire are willing to tremble, willing to share the fruit of their own flawed stories, willing to shake not only with terror, but with laughter, with pleasure, with awe.

15. Life on the other side of terror, pretty please. The happy accident of surviving hell and meandering my way toward wholeness; the marvel of finding myself at ease with serpents and superheroes, unfazed by any nightmare. Ready to tremble.