Lesson from a lion

In the back of an open jeep, surrounded by long yellow grass and blue sky, The Doctor and I watched a lion lazily yawn and flick his tail not 20 metres away from us. We were at Dinokeng Game Reserve, on a well-deserved mid-week break 200km from the city of Johannesburg, where we now stay. Just 20 minutes earlier, as we were eating our oats on the front porch of our chalet in the bush, still in our pajamas, the owner of the bush camp asked us if we wanted to go on a little drive into the bush, as a lion had been spotted not too far away. We threw on clothes and jumped on the jeep, and now here we were, face to face with the king of the jungle.

"What if he attacks?" The Doctor asked me in hushed tones. "What do you mean?" I asked, noticing panic in his eyes. "What if the lion decides we look like lunch?" he asked, as the driver of the jeep inched closer to allow us to take better pictures. His fear was palpable, radiating off him like pheromones. "Then you die," I answered with mock cheerfulness, and grinned.

Later on, our game drive continued, with plenty of far less threatening prey for my ever-clicking camera. All the while, I thought about fear. Why was I not scared in that moment, when we faced the lion, a ferocious beast of the wild? Why did I just trust that this was not a dangerous moment, that being eaten by a lion was not how The Doctor and I would meet our end?

I thought back, and realised I've never really been scared of those traditionally scary things - heights, flying, pain, needles, ostrich-riding, relocating to foreign places I know very little about - and instead really strange things fill me with dread, such as having to make a phonecall, for one thing. Having to deal with unpleasant and unavoidable conflict is another. But most frequently I have felt that anxious feeling, a leady heaviness in my tummy as if I'd swallowed a billiard ball, while sitting in front of a laptop, staring at a cursor blinking at me tauntingly. I get paralysed with fear at the thought that what I will write will be...bad. (Gasp and pause for effect.)

I grew up hating to make mistakes. My grandma dedicated the Fairground Attraction song (It's Got to Be) Perfect to me when I was still in the early grades of school. I was a klutz, as my mom called me, and every time I dropped a glass or knocked over a potplant I would quite literally beat myself over the head with my little fists, apologising and close to tears with shame. I was really, really hard on myself.

I read an article once that said that it's quite common in little girls who are smart to want to do things perfectly the first time, and if not, give up. You see, the article explained that when little girls achieve in school, they get told, "You're so smart! You're so clever!" as if intelligence is an innate thing, a natural talent. Little boys, by contrast, develop later cognitively. It's often a difficult task just to get the little hyperactive buggers to sit still and pay attention in the early grades of school. They get told things such as, "If you just made an effort and tried a little harder, I'm sure you can get this right." Little boys are given the message that if you work hard and keep trying, you can achieve success. In other words, little girls grow up believing you either have it or you don't, whereas little boys believe that it's through hard work, repetition and perseverance that you can get good. This accounts for why, in the research described in the article, young girls would give up after failure, whereas young boys would try and try till they got it right.

Believe this theory or not, it's neither here nor there. The point it, I, like many other smart girls, didn't want to work hard. School was easy, and when it wasn't anymore, I gave up. I quit science in my Matric year, because I was getting Cs. I did not want to fail, under any circumstance. I wanted to be nothing short of excellent, at all times, in all fields, even something I had just learnt. Anything short of brilliance would bring upon (imagined?) disapprobation from my parents, teachers, lecturers, other authority figures I respected, and intense and crippling shame in me. Conversely, nothing gave me a better feeling than getting 90% for a paper I just wrote last night. Emphatic praise from my superiors gave me a high. I lived for external approval. I still live for gold stars. Two or three please, if possible.

So what does this longwinded personal history have to do with fear? Well, dear reader, as any true procrastinator knows, there comes a point where you start to be intimidated by your own success. The fear of not being able to replicate your previous genius, seeing as it was based almost entirely on natural ability and not repetitive effort and determination, is probably the main source of writer's block. You start thinking, "Everyone thinks I'm really good and talented. What happens if what I write next is total and utter crap? What will people think?" The process of putting pen to paper, or rather fingers to keyboard, and simply starting thus becomes an obstacle equivalent to starting a bushfire in Antarctica.

So this was the epiphany I had in the back seat of an open jeep in the middle of the African wilderness: To fear failure is to fear success. You'll never get anywhere if you don't have the courage, the wherewithal to just write, to just try, to just produce, no matter the consequences. This moment of clarity was echoed a few days later at a workshop run by this guy called Simon on our innate potential and areas of natural ability. I asked him about how I could overcome my bizarrely deep resistance to doing something I love. He told me that human beings will rationalise just about anything. "Because you hate failure, you'd rather not write," he told me. "No one can reject you, no one can give you negative feedback if you simply don't produce anything. You're protecting yourself from bad feelings by just not doing anything at all!" The key, he said, was to train my brain to associate writing with creation, rather than with the search for approval. "Don't do it for other people. Other people be damned! Do it because you are creating something that didn't exist before, no matter the quality." You can't succeed if you're not willing to fail.

If you haven't twigged by now, this entire post is a very long apology for being absent since leaving India to return to South Africa over 4 months ago, and a rumination on what has been keeping me away so long. Fear, dear reader, is the short answer. Fear of being good, fear of being bad. Being good comes with a responsibility to keep doing what you're doing, being bad means carrying guilt and shame like a baby elephant sitting on your chest. But I've made the decision to set the baby elephant down, to release myself from the burden of caring what others think. So as much as I love you, dear reader, I'm going to stop listening to the little voice in my head that cares too much about what you think, that craves your gold stars. I write to create. And hopefully I will continue to do so for a very long time.