hematophobia

A new direction

PNRJ personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 31 JDN 2460311

CW: Spiders [it’ll make sense in context]

My time at the University of Edinburgh is officially over. For me it was a surprisingly gradual transition: Because of the holiday break, I had already turned in my laptop and ID badge over a week ago, and because my medical leave, I hadn’t really done much actual work for quite some time. But this is still a momentous final deadline; it’s really, truly, finally over.

I now know with some certainty that leaving Edinburgh early was the right choice, and if anything I should have left sooner or never taken the job in the first place. (It seems I am like Randall Munroe after all.) But what I don’t know is where to go next.

We won’t be starving or homeless. My husband still has his freelance work, and my mother has graciously offered to let us stay in her spare room for awhile. We have some savings to draw upon. Our income will be low enough that payments on my student loans will be frozen. We’ll be able to get by, even if I can’t find work for awhile. But I certainly don’t want to live like that forever.

I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for new career paths, including ones I would never have considered before. Right now I am considering: Back into academia (but much choosier about what sort of school and position), into government or an international aid agency, re-training to work in software development, doing my own freelance writing (then I must decide: fiction or nonfiction? Commercial publishing, or self-published?), publishing our own tabletop games (we have one almost ready for crowdfunding, and another that I could probably finish relatively quickly), opening a game shop or escape room, or even just being a stay-at-home parent (surely the hardest to achieve financially; and while on the one hand it seems like an awful waste of a PhD, on the other hand it would really prove once and for all that I do understand the sunk cost fallacy, and therefore be a sign of my ultimate devotion to behavioral economics). The one mainstream option for an econ PhD that I’m not seriously considering is the private sector: If academia was this soul-sucking, I’m not sure I could survive corporate America.

Maybe none of these are yet the right answer. Or maybe some combination is.

What I’m really feeling right now is a deep uncertainty.

Also, fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of failure. Fear of rejection. Almost any path I could take involves rejection—though of different kinds, and surely some more than others.

I’ve always been deeply and intensely affected by rejection. Some of it comes from formative experiences I had as a child and a teenager; some of it may simply be innate, the rejection-sensitive dysphoria that often comes with ADHD (which I now believe I have, perhaps mildly). (Come to think of it, even those formative experiences may have hit so hard because of my innate predisposition.)

But wherever it comes from, my intense fear of rejection is probably my greatest career obstacle. In today’s economy, just applying for a job—any job—requires bearing dozens of rejections. Openings get hundreds of applicants, so even being fully qualified is no guarantee of anything.

This makes it far more debilitating than most other kinds of irrational fear. I am also hematophobic, but that doesn’t really get in my way all that much; in the normal course of life, one generally tries to avoid bleeding anyway. (Now that MSM can donate blood, it does prevent me from doing that; and I do feel a little bad about that, since there have been blood shortages recently.)

But rejection phobia basically feels like this:

Imagine you are severely arachnophobic, just absolutely terrified of spiders. You are afraid to touch them, afraid to look at them, afraid to be near them, afraid to even think about them too much. (Given how common it is, you may not even have to imagine.)

Now, imagine (perhaps not too vividly, if you are genuinely arachnophobic!) that every job, every job, in every industry, regardless of what skills are required or what the work entails, requires you to first walk through a long hallway which is covered from floor to ceiling in live spiders. This is simply a condition of employment in our society: Everyone must be able to walk through the hallway full of spiders. Some jobs have longer hallways than others, some have more or less aggressive spiders, and almost none of the spiders are genuinely dangerous; but every job, everywhere, requires passing through a hallway of spiders.

That’s basically how I feel right now.

Freelance writing is the most obvious example—we could say this is an especially long hallway with especially large and aggressive spiders. To succeed as a freelance writer requires continually submitting work you have put your heart and soul into, and receiving in response curtly-worded form rejection letters over and over and over, every single time. And even once your work is successful, there will always be critics to deal with.

Yet even a more conventional job, say in academia or government, requires submitting dozens of applications and getting rejected dozens of times. Sometimes it’s also a curt form letter; other times, you make it all the way through multiple rounds of in-depth interviews and still get turned down. The latter honestly stings a lot more than the former, even though it’s in some sense a sign of your competence: they wouldn’t have taken you that far if you were unqualified; they just think they found someone better. (Did they actually? Who knows?) But investing all that effort for zero reward feels devastating.

The other extreme might be becoming a stay-at-home parent. There aren’t as many spiders in this hallway. While biological children aren’t really an option for us, foster agencies really can’t afford to be choosy. Since we don’t have any obvious major red flags, we will probably be able to adopt if we choose to—there will be bureaucratic red tape, no doubt, but not repeated rejections. But there is one very big rejection—one single, genuinely dangerous spider that lurks in a dark corner of the hallway: What if I am rejected by the child? What if they don’t want me as their parent?

Another alternative is starting a business—such as selling our own games, or opening an escape room. Even self-publishing has more of this character than traditional freelance writing. The only direct, explicit sort of rejection we’d have to worry about there is small business loans; and actually with my PhD and our good credit, we could reasonably expect to get accepted sooner or later. But there is a subtler kind of rejection: What if the market doesn’t want us? What if the sort of games or books (or escape experiences, or whatever) we have to offer just aren’t what the world seems to want? Most startup businesses fail quickly; why should ours be any different? (I wonder if I’d be able to get a small business loan on the grounds that I forecasted only a 50% chance of failing in the first year, instead of the baseline 80%. Somehow, I suspect not.)

I keep searching for a career option with no threat of rejection, and it just… doesn’t seem to exist. The best I can come up with is going off the grid and living as hermits in the woods somewhere. (This sounds pretty miserable for totally different reasons—as well as being an awful, frankly unconscionable waste of my talents.) As long as I continue to live within human society and try to contribute to the world, rejection will rear its ugly head.

Ultimately, I think my only real option is to find a way to cope with rejection—or certain forms of rejection. The hallways full of spiders aren’t going away. I have to find a way to walk through them.

On Horror

PNRJ current events, personal , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 29 JDN 2460247

Since this post will go live the weekend before Halloween, the genre of horror seemed a fitting topic.

I must confess, I don’t really get horror as a genre. Generally I prefer not to experience fear and disgust? This can’t be unusual; it’s literally a direct consequence of the evolutionary function of fear and disgust. It’s wanting to be afraid and disgusted that’s weird.

Cracked once came out with a list of “Horror Movies for People Who Hate Horror”, and I found some of my favorite films on it, such as Alien (which is as much sci-fi as horror), The Cabin in the Woods, (which is as much satire) and Zombieland (which is a comedy). Other such lists have prominently featured Get Out (which is as much political as it is horrific), Young Frankenstein (which is entirely a comedy), and The Silence of the Lambs (which is horror, at least in large part, but which I didn’t so much enjoy as appreciate as a work of artistry; I watch it the way I look at Guernica). Some such lists include Saw, which I can appreciate on some level—it does have a lot of sociopolitical commentary—but still can’t enjoy (it’s just too gory). I note that none of these lists seem to include Event Horizon, which starts out as a really good sci-fi film, but then becomes so very much horror that I ended up hating it.

In trying to explain the appeal of horror to me, people have likened it to the experience of a roller coaster: Isn’t fear exhilarating?

I do enjoy roller coasters. But the analogy falls flat for me, because, well, my experience of riding a roller coaster isn’t fear—the exhilaration comes directly from the experience of moving so fast, a rush of “This is awesome!” that has nothing to do with being afraid. Indeed, should I encounter a roller coaster that actually made me afraid, I would assiduously avoid it, and wonder if it was up to code. My goal is not to feel like I’m dying; it’s to feel like I’m flying.

And speaking of flying: Likewise, the few times I have had the chance to pilot an aircraft were thrilling in a way it is difficult to convey to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. I think it might be something like what religious experiences feel like. The sense of perspective, looking down on the world below, seeing it as most people never see it. The sense of freedom, of, for once in your life, actually having the power to maneuver freely in all three dimensions. The subtle mix of knowing that you are traveling at tremendous speed while feeling as if you are peacefully drifting along. Astronauts also describe this sort of experience, which no doubt is even more intense for them.

Yet in all that, fear was never my primary emotion, and had it been, it would have undermined the experience rather than enhanced it. The brief moment when our engine stalled flying over Scotland certainly raised my heart rate, but not in a pleasant way. In that moment—objectively brief, subjectively interminable—I spent all of my emotional energy struggling to remain calm. It helped to continually remind myself of what I knew about aerodynamics: Wings want to fly. An airplane without an engine isn’t a rock; it’s a glider. It is entirely possible to safely land a small aircraft on literally zero engine power. Still, I’m glad we got the propeller started again and didn’t have to.

I have also enjoyed classic horror novels such as Dracula and Frankenstein; their artistry is also quite apparent, and reading them as books provides an emotional distance that watching them as films often lacks. I particularly notice this with vampire stories, as I can appreciate the romantic allure of immortality and the erotic tension of forbidden carnal desire—but the sight of copious blood on screen tends to trigger my mild hematophobia.

Yet if fear is the goal, surely having a phobia should only make it stronger and thus better? And yet, this seems to be a pattern: People with genuine phobia of the subject in question don’t actually enjoy horror films on the subject. Arachnophobes don’t often watch films about giant spiders. Cynophobes are rarely werewolf aficionados. And, indeed, rare is the hematophobe who is a connoisseur of vampire movies.

Moreover, we rarely see horror films about genuine dangers in the world. There are movies about rape, murder, war, terrorism, espionage, asteroid impacts, nuclear weapons and climate change, but (with rare exceptions) they aren’t horror films. They don’t wallow in fear the way that films about vampires, ghosts and werewolves do. They are complex thrillers (Argo, Enemy of the State, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Broken Arrow), police procedurals (most films about rape or murder), heroic sagas (just about every war film), or just fun, light-hearted action spectacles (Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow). Rather than a loosely-knit gang of helpless horny teenagers, they have strong, brave heroes. Even films about alien invasions aren’t usually horror (Alien notwithstanding); they also tend to be heroic war films. Unlike nuclear war or climate change, alien invasion is a quite unlikely event; but it’s surely more likely than zombies or werewolves.

In other words, when something is genuinely scary, the story is always about overcoming it. There is fear involved, but in the end we conquer our fear and defeat our foes. The good guys win in the end.

I think, then, that enjoyment of horror is not about real fear. Feeling genuinely afraid is unpleasant—as by all Darwinian rights it should be.

Horror is about simulating fear. It’s a kind of brinksmanship: You take yourself to the edge of fear and then back again, because what you are seeing would be scary if it were real, but deep down, you know it isn’t. You can sleep at night after watching movies about zombies, werewolves and vampires, because you know that there aren’t really such things as zombies, werewolves and vampires.

What about the exceptions? What about, say, The Silence of the Lambs? Psychopathic murderers absolutely are real. (Not especially common—but real.) But The Silence of the Lambs only works because of truly brilliant writing, directing, and acting; and part of what makes it work is that it isn’t just horror. It has layers of subtlety, and it crosses genres—it also has a good deal of police procedural in it, in fact. And even in The Silence of the Lambs, at least one of the psychopathic murderers is beaten in the end; evil does not entirely prevail.

Slasher films—which I especially dislike (see above: hematophobia)—seem like they might be a counterexample, in that there genuinely are a common subgenre and they mainly involve psychopathic murderers. But in fact almost all slasher films involve some kind of supernatural element: In Friday the 13th, Jason seems to be immortal. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger doesn’t just attack you with a knife, he invades your dreams. Slasher films actually seem to go out of their way to make the killer not real. Perhaps this is because showing helpless people murdered by a realistic psychopath would inspire too much genuine fear.

The terrifying truth is that, more or less at any time, a man with a gun could in fact come and shoot you, and while there may be ways to reduce that risk, there’s no way to make it zero. But that isn’t fun for a movie, so let’s make him a ghost or a zombie or something, so that when the movie ends, you can remind yourself it’s not real. Let’s pretend to be afraid, but never really be afraid.

Realizing that makes me at least a little more able to understand why some people enjoy horror.

Then again, I still don’t.