Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
Growing up, my family would take advantage of my educator dad’s summer break to drive around different regions of the U.S. in our mini-van and pop-up camper. I remember the colors of our vans through the years–burgundy, then white, then silver, and finally that one in a nebulous shade of green or gold, depending on who you asked. When I try to focus on the specific memories of those road-trips, though, the sequence of colors quickly muddles into a shade of gray. I joke now to my parents that they could have saved a buck or two by not bringing me along, since my memories of early childhood are so fuzzy anyway.
As I began to think on this month’s theme, I nonetheless did my best to dig into that fuzz. What was it that little Lukie was afraid of? Like many of my fellow writers, a few movies quickly came to mind. For me, it was the grasshoppers in A Bug’s Life and Jim Carrey’s performance in How the Grinch Stole Christmas that resulted in nightmares and burying my head in the back of a movie theater seat. But even while I grasped at distinguishing my own memories of those events from simply the stories told about them by my family, nothing much more significant stood out.
That alone is perhaps remarkable, when taking into account everything a child could be afraid of. We’re warned of mysterious monsters under the bed, of sinister strangers luring us into their unmarked vehicles, and getting lost in the supermarket (thank goodness my parents had a nifty Child Identification Card polaroid for such occasions, which I repurposed for the cover photo of this piece). Middle school births new anxieties of social ostracization, high school introduces terrors of academic and eventual career failure–and I’m just pulling generally from my own trauma-free upbringing, here.
I try to imagine facing some of these same fears as an adult. I close my eyes and teleport myself back to the carpeted “niches” of Holland Christian Middle School where we hung out during between-class breaks. The popular group struts by, including the girl I’ve had a crush on since first grade, and glances over with a slight but ever-so-powerful disdain. I go into the science classroom and say hi to the teacher who brought me to tears that morning. She had yelled at me after I threw away a half-eaten pudding cup sitting by the edge of the whiteboard, I hadn’t known she’d been saving it for a mold-growing experiment. The final bell dismisses us for the day and I make my way to the auditorium for play practice, where I stuff down my embarrassment of being cast as the lean, mean trifecta of “King Munchkin,” “Evil Tree,” and “Flying Monkey” after everyone told me I was a shoe-in for the Tin Man.
How did Lukie do it? He didn’t even blink when he got out of bed each day and faced those challenges. Nowadays I’m practically brought to my knees just because my boss used a little less punctuation than usual in her email and I assume she’s super pissed at me.
Maybe my young predecessor was braver than I am, perhaps a tad more resilient? Or maybe he woke up to a world each day that felt fuller, more capable of matching its share of anxious encounters with wondrous ones. Yes, he must have experienced the icy grip of adrenaline compressing his stomach with its unrelenting fingers, but there are other experiences that break through the fuzz of his narrative with more clarity. Moments like a Speedway employee letting him refill his slushie after dropping it in the parking lot, or figuring out that he could borrow CDs from the library for free to upload into his iTunes for later. Like the smell of a friend’s house where there was an unlimited Battlefront 2 screen time limit to compliment an unlimited amount of smiles and giggles. Like a hug from a parent in the kitchen, accompanied by a promise that there’s nothing he could do that would ever make them love him any less.
Can Luke wake up as bravely as Lukie used to? I think he can. Let’s give it a shot tomorrow morning.
Luke Brandsen graduated in 2019 and uses his business/HR degree to inform directing mission-focused programs. He currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he squints at the players on his bootleg soccer stream, breaks guitar strings, and desperately tries to recall where the last D&D session he ran left off.
