My Practice of Fear

-- By JabariMatthew - 16 Apr 2021

My Fear of Being Worthless

I have long been moved by a sentiment that James Baldwin expressed in his essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind. Baldwin stated that if one continuously survives the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring. On its face, there is not much seemingly novel about that sentiment, however he mentioned that the newfound ability to no longer be controlled by the fear of what life can bring comes from the fact that in order to save your life, you are forced to look beneath appearances, take nothing for granted, and hear the meaning behind words. I find these sentiments similar to a few themes that have come up throughout this course, including the idea that creation is where pain exists, the fact that we can always look at something in more ways than is being presented before us, and the idea that the life of law is not logic, but the messiness of experience.

The Comfort of Gold Stars

1L has made me think a little more about what I fear, and the truth is, I am beginning to realize that what I fear most is the feeling of being worthless. To that point, in the same essay mentioned previously, Baldwin expressed that people cannot live without their sense of worth, and as such, the most dangerous creation of any society is one who has nothing to lose. He suggested that this desire to fight for a sense of self-worth is part of what ignited the Nation of Islam. I am absolutely terrified of feeling worthless, and I know that because I have felt that way before both consciously and subconsciously. Feelings of worthlessness remind me of a multitude of experiences including traversing the segregated climate of New York City, growing up in a low-income community, being intellectually doubted, and my own humiliating encounters with police officers. The reason why 1L has been particularly helpful in illuminating what it is I fear most is because there are plenty of conventional “gold stars” to be passed around from extracurricular activities, grades, internships, moot court competitions and journals. I am beginning to believe however, that the only way I will have a fulfilling and empowering creative legal practice is if my fear of not having a happy and creative legal practice trumps my longstanding fear of feeling worthless. I suppose however that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In other words, perhaps I can avoid feelings of worthlessness because I am living a happy and creative legal practice as opposed to a legal practice that is filled with conventional “gold stars.”

The Need for Fear

At the same time, in line with previous sentiments expressed throughout this course and by Baldwin, perhaps my fear of worthlessness will not only allow me to see more clearly, but will also allow me to tap into a deep degree of creativity that I can utilize not only to enrich my career, but also to help enrich the lives of others. In other words, I believe I am much more interested in being able to utilize my fears than get rid of them. I am much more interested in constantly having to fight my fears and win every now and again than completely overcoming them. But more importantly, I am interested in figuring out how to expose pain and fears in others in order to allow others to see more clearly. Perhaps law school is a great place to begin, for as previously stated in this course, no matter how hard law school tries, society will always creep in. Society, as suggested in this course, is that messiness, pain and reality that gives law its true life and meaning, and not the sanitized fallacies of logic.

How This Applies to My Practice

I believe people are generally terrified, to varying degrees, of losing a sense of self-worth or identity. As a lawyer, I think my practice should involve illuminating that fear in order to create that sense of clarity in one’s mind, and then help others constantly fight against that fear in order to feel empowered by their persistent survival. As a psychology and theatre major in college, I often found it much easier to take this kind of approach because I gravitated towards the types of dramas that exposed the mental fears and traumas of various characters and their fight to overcome them. While it is far from me to suggest I know what a vast majority of humans believe provides them a sense of self-worth, I know that there are likely enough people who trick themselves into believing that self-worth equates to gains not outside of personal wealth or accolades. Perhaps that trickery is in line with what Thoreau described as the plague of pervasive selfishness. I would like my practice to fight against that trickery which works to allow others to dissociate themselves from their fear of lack of self-worth and instead, to remind others that while such gains have their benefits, there is something more intangible that truly defines self-worth. Perhaps it is as simple as respect, power, or “a seat at the table.” Either way, those intangibles are far harder to gain but much more worth fighting for. I want my practice to expose the truths of this country, the flaws of humans, and the pain that comes with that because I believe such exposition will come people’s fear of continuing this pain, and then the self-empowerment in knowing that every day that we fight to overcome, though we do not completely overcome, we at least survive. And as Baldwin expressed, it is the survival of death that brings the control. It is a picture for my practice that I can readily imagine taking, but that truthfully, I intend to spend my remaining time at Columbia and beyond learning how to actually take.

The best route to improvement here, in my view, is to start by tightening the writing, stringently. The present draft weakens its force significantly by repetition and baggy sentence structure. Every sentence must contribute a new idea. Every word must be doing work that cannot be done by any other word. After pruning and compression you will have elegance. Also, you will have space in which to introduce the other topic of the essay, which is only implicit in this draft: the difference between fear and shame. Your central insight is that fear can be a root of creativity, an emotion one could better live with than overcome. But this insight requires the distinction from shame, which is the most destructive of human emotions. When we come to "fear of worthlessness," we are standing on the border, which is where this fascinating and powerful essay has something important to say.

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