[Disclaimer: This post cites with research done on men. But I think it has implications for everyone. ]
In my brother Kip's column for the Dartmouth Mirror, he described sociologist Michael Kimmel's research indicating that the greatest fear for men is not physical assault or even death, but "being laughed at."
This statement seems pretty true for me. I can't count the number of times that I've refused to do something, or gone along and done something, for fear of being laughed at. So it was that I found myself just a few hours ago at the gym, after a day of writing in the library, feeling inexplicably miserable, frustrated, and depressed. My day had been predictable and isolated. I'd hardly had a conversation with anyone. Over the past years, I've experienced mild depression for varying periods of time, but the past few months had been consistently more bleak than I had known. And my reluctance to tell anyone about the struggle hadn't made it any easier. While the change in seasons and family visits over the past few weeks had lifted my spirits, the sudden return of that numb, sinking feeling of despair in the gym was alarming. I felt a bit like Sisyphus, with the boulder back at the bottom of the hill. I hadn't even had the energy to change into proper clothes, but was working out in jeans and a t-shirt. But then, I heard music.
The weight-room is connected to the basketball gym by a glass door. Through the door, I could see a dance class in progress--all women, led by an instructor who was shaking his hips with enough sass to make Gaga's mouth drop. Here was a situation that fit perfectly into Kimmel's observation, that men fear embarrassment more than anything else. The mere idea of entering the class made me anxious.
A thought entered my head. What if I forced myself to go into the class? This was a chance to tackle my fear of embarrassment head-on. And, maybe, it would help get me out of my funk. And so, feeling extremely nervous, I walked on inside. The music had just started up after a break, and the instructor's eyes widened with surprise as I came in. "You want to join us?" he asked. I nodded and then, goofily, gave a 'thumbs-up' sign. "Fabulous!" he said. "Allright, here we go!" And so I began dancing my clumsiest best. I drew a fair amount of head-turning from the weightlifters who walked past the glass door, and maybe a few laughs; no doubt they were surprised and amused to see me suddenly joining in with the Zumba crowd. I rarely allow myself to feel ridiculous; it's the supreme act of social vulnerability, a feeling that jesters and modern-day comics are probably quite used to. Lowering the defenses, and simply pushing through my self-conscious resistance to embarrassing myself, I felt a huge burden lift. I realized that the only person who could make me feel embarrassed was myself.
On the outside looking in, this situation might not have seemed like anything remarkable. So you took a Zumba class. So what? It's funny to me, too; that, though I've been in other situations that objectively should have seemed more frightening, for some reason I was more nervous about doing this than perhaps anything else. And that's precisely Kimmel's point--that the fear of being laughed at is often disproportionate to any actual danger you might be facing.
Two months later, Kip came to visit me in Boston for a weekend. We went to the Cambridge Music Festival, and found ourselves in front of an absurdly talented funk band whose magic had enchanted a huge crowd. We stood at the front, nodding our heads in the way that men do when they want to enjoy the music but not seem "too" into it. Two college kids were shimmying around up front, making up their own dance moves while the rest of us watched and listened. As the music went on, Kip and I just started to let ourselves move a little bit more. I was completely aware of the walls I was putting up around dancing--something in my head told me that I 'needed' this, but I was doing my best to convince myself not to. I decided, again, to just step into that fear. I took off my backpack. "Kip, we're totally going to dance to this." He nodded. "Oh yeah, definitely." I took a few steps forward, into the open space, and just let it go.
Needless to say, it was the most fun I'd had in a while. But it was more than fun. Without trying to sound too dramatic, that night of dancing and jumping around the streets of Harvard to all of these amazing bands with my awesome brother opened me up to the world. Together, we dropped our defenses. I felt like I finally understood what Rumi was talking about when said, "When you do things from your soul, you feel a river, a joy."
Both those decisions, to enter that Zumba class, and later, to dance in front of strangers, were about stepping through my fear. Fear is a compass that guides you in the right direction. So follow your fear. As Rumi says, "Live where you fear to live." Let yourself go to the places that scare you. And it's ok to start small. Maybe, like me, shaking your butt in a Zumba class is a good first step.
