[FRIAM] help me understand

[Jon Zingale]

To what extent is this about anxiety, fear, and the perception of threat?

I grew up near several roller-coaster parks. As a kid, I felt a lot of
anxiety about going on rides with my siblings. That was fear of something
anticipated, maybe imagined.

Getting off the roller coaster was different. My body had actually been
thrown around, safely but intensely, in exactly the way the ride was meant
to thrill. Perhaps it was simulating something like being in the toothy maw
of a T-Rex. Checking in with my body afterward felt more like a response to
something that had actually happened.

On a battlefield, I assume both defenders and aggressors feel scared. What
is less clear to me is what presenting as scared is supposed to do socially
or politically.

My band plays 2nd Street Rufina on Friday. Is stage fright the same as
being scared? When I see my little boy today after a week at his mom’s, he
may need time to warm up. Is that reticence also fear?

There is also the response to imagined relations between imagined
communities. I often experience something like a generalized fear of being
inappropriately classified. That is, perhaps oddly, the subject of quite a
few uncomfortable dreams: I am back in middle school, somehow also the age
I am now, and no one seems to understand that it makes no sense for me to
be there.

In my often younger, leftist circles, I feel real pressure to constantly
signal virtue: to present as an empathetic cis white male when nothing in
my soul could feel further from that description. Socially, I can feel a
persistent kind of body dysmorphia, in which my presentation and my being
are almost never aligned. I keep hoping that a long observed record of
behavior will outweigh the immediate classification, but honestly, who is
paying that much attention anyway?
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