FALSE EVIDENCE APPEARING REAL
My parents lived very, very busy lives. Too busy to have a child, really. Too busy often to feel their own emotions, let alone those of their little girl. Not only was I taught not to feel, but I was also taught to solve my problems on my own. I spent much of my childhood alone. My mother and father were often away from home, or they sent me away to summer camps, trips with friends, a year abroad, school programs overseas. I led the privileged life of essentially an only child, who found safety in the pages of my books and the stories I made up in my mind instead of in people.
As a little girl I was sent down to the beach to play for six hours at a stretch by myself. I was always encouraged to write stories, draw, and read up in my room. My parents exhorted me to learn to enjoy my own company. I still do. For that I will always be grateful. But fear and loneliness always kept tugging at my shirttails—just as they had my mother.
From the time I was seven years old, we lived with an armed security guard in our home. Shortly after the Manson murders, we arrived at our beach house one evening to find all the furniture slashed and everything covered with “blood” (which turned out to be catsup). My mother’s anxiety spiraled out of control, and the security guard arrived shortly thereafter. My mother’s fear for me filled my life like an eerie presence.
“You must be lonely,” fear said over breakfast at Vacation Village, when I was seven. In an effort to have some much-needed private time, my parents sent me to the hotel dining room with a newspaper to read along with instructions on how to leave the proper tip. They told me this was good practice for becoming a grownup, and that I should observe everyone around me so I could tell them about anything interesting I’d seen or heard. To this day, I love eating at restaurants alone and making up stories about all my fellow diners. At the time, however, I just wished I could be with my parents or with my friends. I spent enough time alone at home—I didn’t need more on vacation.
“I bet you wish you could go home,” fear needled the summer I was twelve on the airplane to summer camp in Colorado. This was my second year at that same camp, and I didn’t have very many good memories of my previous summer there. Before I’d left for camp that first year, my mother, my dad, and I had been living as a family together in our big house in Beverly Hills. I came back to a newly divorced mother who was barely holding it together in an apartment on the far reaches of the San Fernando Valley. As it turned out, my second summer in Colorado was one of the best summers of my life—but even now, I often feel that old, anxious ache in my heart whenever I leave home.
“You could die and no one would find you,” fear clamored, when a man I had just met took me on a midnight “tour” of Hamburg’s red light district, the infamous Reeperbahn, the year my mother banished me to a school in Germany when I turned sixteen, ostensibly due to my grades (though actually prompted by her own fear of my leaving her behind for my friends). The terror I felt for the first few months living in a foreign country whose language I couldn’t speak felt immense. Eventually, however, I grew to love living in Germany. I adored my host family and all my new friends. It proved to be what still remains the best year of my entire life.
As a little girl, my response to feeling fear was taking more and more risks. I rode horses with names like Nip n Tuck who gleefully tossed me over fences. I took pride in being sent to the principal’s office for any offense. Whatever misadventures I had, they were badges of honor: I was not going to end up afraid like my mother.
As I grew up, however, fear began to succeed in getting my attention. Like a car salesman who won’t stop until you’ve bought the car you never really wanted with all of the bells and whistles you absolutely don’t need, fear’s whole livelihood depends on us buying into it. All of us do, though none of us really want to admit it. It’s only by facing down our fears that we begin to recognize fear as the liar it always is. Gradually, we come to know that fear is really just False Evidence Appearing Real.
To fully heal fear and come back home to our hearts, we have to disempower it by understanding it was never ours. I had no intention of letting my mother’s fears become my own. The moment I did, I gave them a foothold in me. The fears of our forebears often find homes in us long before we become aware of their presence.
Like my mother, I have also been ashamed to be afraid. I see myself as a strong woman who has made her way through the world essentially alone my whole life. What I couldn’t see until I began my daily practice of joy were all the ways that fear clamped down over my heart.
First, I had to recognize that the legacy of fear my mother seemed to have passed down to me had been passed down to her, too. Recognizing that, I was able to stop blaming her by seeing that she had been just like me.
As we get older, we either expand into love or contract into fear. Expansion equals joy, curiosity, and openness of mind, heart, and spirit. Contraction equals doubt, rigidity, judgment, closed-mindedness, and ultimately a shut-down heart.
The older my mother got, the more fearful she became. She looked in the mirror and saw everything she did not like about herself. She looked at her daughter and was afraid that my unruly approach to life would doom me.
The older my dad got, the freer he became. The less he cared about what other people thought, and the more joyful his life grew.
When I began my daily practice of joy, I chose to live with my dad’s expansive wide-open heart. But a lifetime of fear left very little room for me to really let Love in. I hadn’t grasped how much I had allowed my mother’s messages of fear to seep into my psyche: fear of what others would think. Fear of losing the approval of others. Even fear for my own safety. For decades, I had been living with my own armed security guard . . . in my head.