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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