Earthquakes and Groundlessness: Revisiting Childhood Fears

I asked my dad a week or so ago if he thought I'd ever be able to write about something other than death again. He said probably not.

My recent writer's block? I'm worried this will become a death blog instead of a life blog.

Even before Lauren died, I definitely already thought about death more than the average twenty-one-year-old. I can trace it back to my adolescence.

Pictured: me unable to enjoy the moment. The distaste for the troubles of life started early.

When I was a kid, I used to make my mom repeat a series of affirmations with me each night before I went to sleep. It went like this: "Bugs won't eat my teeth. Bad dreams won't come. Earthquakes won't come. I'll fall asleep and you can wake me up."

The first statement is probably my mom's fault for scaring me into perfect dental hygiene with the threat of tooth-eating insects. The second seems like a pretty normal kid attempt to fend off nightmares. The third was apparently added to the bedtime affirmations list after my first experience with an earthquake. The fourth one, however, is mildly disconcerting.

I've been reflecting back on this and trying to wrap my head around my childhood anxieties. Was I afraid of not falling asleep and the painful wakefulness of that experience? Or was I afraid of falling asleep and never waking up? It seems I was already oddly existential less than a decade into my life.

The fear of earthquakes thing may have started after my first earthquake experience, but that fear turned into a kind of full-blown paranoia when I was about twelve. I had a period of time where it felt like every waking thought was about earthquakes. I consulted my eighth grade science teacher about this fear in an attempt to temper it and understand scientifically if it was rational or not. My teacher pretty much told me my fear made sense—we lived in California after all.

There was just something about earthquakes that I couldn't handle. The uncertainty, perhaps. They were invisible. Impossible to anticipate. Whenever we drove over an overpass, I hoped with all my might that no earthquake would come while we were driving over it, trying not to picture the collapse of the giant contraption that my fragile life was momentarily dependent on.

Then a few years later came COVID-19. My sophomore year of high school was moved online, and my life felt eerily quiet and slow, as much of the world experienced. My time at home was actually relatively peaceful—it was then that I got into birding, baked cookies with my dad, wrote a lot of poetry, and went for daily neighborhood walks.

But the death thoughts got loud in my head. I checked my county's COVID-19 case and hospitalizations and fatalities tracker like it was my new favorite social media platform. My immediate family stayed almost completely isolated from everyone but each other, but I still cried myself to sleep countless nights just thinking about my parents getting sick and dying. Maybe someone would infect my mom through her mask and from more than six feet away in the thirty minutes each week that she was at the grocery store.

Sometimes, I thought I was dying too. I'd feel my heart skip a beat or some weird feeling in my stomach as I was falling asleep and assume I wasn't going to wake up. My hypochondria was the worst it had ever been. More than ever, I needed someone to tell me I would fall asleep and still wake up the next morning.

It was around then, though, that I started to get into Buddhism. I read When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, an incredible book that still guides the way I live today.

The Pema Chodron concept of groundlessness—that nothing is firm underneath your feet and you can lose anything and anyone at any moment—was exactly the fear that I seemed to have known and carried with me at six, at twelve, and then at sixteen with COVID. Earthquakes were a perfect demonstration of it: the literal ground under your feet could crumble at any moment.

What Chodron teaches is to embrace it. This is what Buddhism teaches: to know impermanence like the back of your hand, seeing things as they arise and as they cease without trying to control. This is called seeing things as they are; you see everything as fleeting and ever-changing. I see now how it's no wonder I've gravitated toward Buddhism given my lifelong attempts to ward off impermanence. After years of trying to prevent nightmares with repeated mantras and trying to look in each room for the best table to hide under in the case of the next Big One, it makes sense.

Slowly, and a lot thanks to Buddhism, thinking about death became a way for me to let go of anxiety and more freely live my life. I have a few more examples of how conceptual death worked its way into my construction of meaning. Senior year of high school, I gave a ten-minute talk on what I thought the meaning of life was (this was an English class assignment). A direct quote from that talk:

"Sometimes, I unironically remind myself that we could die at any moment. I don't remind myself of that as an excuse to live life recklessly, but more to bring myself back to the present and out of the constant plan-making that goes on in my mind."

Sophomore year of college, my poetry teacher jokingly reprimanded me for thinking too much about death. Four months later, I blatantly ignored her reprimands. I got my first tattoo, an image on my wrist of my favorite bird that has a memento mori double meaning I don't usually explain to people I don't know super well in case they don't want to hear about death.

Then junior year, Lauren's death. Death thoughts now are far from casual "remember you're gonna die" thoughts in my head previously more used to tone down my worrying. Death became a known and felt experience, unbelievably strong in its power to change everything about who I thought I was and could be.

What I used to think would happen after the death of a loved one was a kind of overpass collapse, a folding in on oneself. That did happen for a while and still does at unpredictable moments. But what I am beginning to feel, with time, is the opposite. I feel myself opening to new ways of being as the structures of meaning and childhood routines that once guided my life have shattered and fallen into meaninglessness.

The things I worried about before seem small; the things people said that used to upset me have lost their burn. My retail therapy consists of buying things I used to think I'd never wear. My interactions with strangers grow longer and more open; I am continuing to learn how in this life, I'd rather share and give than keep to myself.

Me when I accept death and realize nothing's all that serious :P

Maybe this will be a death blog. But so is life? Life is a death blog. It catalogues death everywhere; once you start seeing it, it's impossible to unsee. Until recently, I didn't really see it. My anxiety as a kid and a young adult was a form of denial, an attempt to think my way out of death and anticipate it so I'd be more ready. I now do not believe ready ever comes.

If I can say I'm grateful for anything about the last month, it is for what I've learned about the universality of pain. Yesterday, I received an amber alert on my phone about a missing person, and I felt everything all over again, the stomach drop and the ripping pain of disappearance, mind jumping to all the worst case scenarios.

Even though I don't know this person or their family, I see being able to feel even a fraction of what they feel as a blessing. I aspire to have this help me engage with the pain of others more directly and less fearfully, instead of distancing myself from it through the pointless spirals in my head about when it might happen to me.

Pain devastates. But it also transforms. My childhood fears look sillier than ever now. Not because the fears are invalid or irrational, but because fear and worry do nothing to prevent loss. Tuning in to the universality of loss to connect with and relate to others is a skill that Buddhism teaches—a skill that was impossible to truly cultivate while spending so much mental energy casting spells at bedtime to protect myself.