WRITING PROMPT CHALLENGE — FEARS KILL DREAMS

One’s Deepest Fear Should Be Jailed In The Basement

Then throw away the key and nail shut the door

Franklin D. Roosevelt nailed it, and his declaration should stand as definitive.

In the meantime, I believe Rui Alves’s challenge is meant to be more personal and specific.

He hinted at what he was looking for, and I’m taking him at his word.

He wants us to bare our very souls.

Or at least to write with integrity, presence, and confessional detail.

That is, I don’t think my fear of cockroaches is what he had in mind.

Besides, it’s not fear that I keep locked up in my basement.

Here, let me extract the nails and turn on the single bulb, so we can descend those dark forbidding stairs to check on the status of my beast.

My fear isn’t loud.

It doesn’t rattle around inside the dungeon banging on steel bars with some handy rock or slamming stone walls with its head.

My fear sits dejected and depressed, head bowed, surrendered to its fate.

But it wants out. It really wants out. I see this when it looks up at me with anguished eyes, then beyond me to the stairs, engaged in longing so mired in suffering it makes me recheck the jail door.

Its freedom is what I fear most. So yes, a nod to Roosevelt, I fear my fear the most.

I should tell you my fear’s name.

Be prepared. It’s not dramatic or jaw-dropping. In fact, it’s rather normal, like Bob or John or Jane.

My fear’s name is shame.

Not your generic, shared-by-everyone kind of shame.

This is my own, personal, totally neglected shame, left to wallow in the darkness of my basement, a prisoner held in solitary confinement.

As we approach, you’ll see my shame is female.

Don’t read too much into this. It surprised me, as well. Until I thought for a while and realized two things.

• Shame is all about feeling, and feeling to me is a “she.”
• Shame is made all the greater by imprisoning a “she.”

We don’t talk, but I know what she thinks. That is conveyed clearly in her posture, in her visage, and in her silence. She thinks I’m terrified she’ll get out. She thinks I’ll lose my mind if she is roaming free about the world.

She thinks only one of us can inhabit the world at one time.

She knows what I think, too.

I think everything she thinks.

And yes, I can‘t survive with her out there in the world.

Threatening to expose me.

You wonder why I think these things. Why my shame is locked in this dark dungeon. How I live with myself for doing this.

But mostly, you wonder where she came from — this shame.

What could she know about me that could be so life-threatening?

You don’t understand.

She is not specific. Shame is her only name. She has no traits, no identity other than this name. You might easily call her Truth.

She certainly knows the truth of me.

Actually, she knows the truth of what I fear most in me.

I fear most what might not be true about me — as well as what is.

I may not be the good man I think I am. I may not be the greatest writer. I may not be as smart or spiritually aware as I believe.

I may be consummately selfish. I may be the consummate amateur. I may be consummately ignorant and deluded.

In fact, I may not be consummately anything at all.

I might just be a man.

I don’t fear these things so much. I can deal with a lot of truths about myself.

But I don’t keep them locked up in the basement.

What I fear is their exposure to the world.

For that, shame must break free from her barred and shackled world.

And that cannot be allowed to happen.

It just can’t.

There is no room in this world for both of us.