Guest Opinion: Naming Fear’s Kids

— from Jan Ferris Kotun —

A friend refuses to make new year’s resolutions, on the grounds that she never keeps them. I have a new approach: to name their enemy, or enemies, and avoid them, rather than avoiding the worthwhile directions that benefit my creative self.

Who are the enemies of new year’s resolutions?

The main enemy is Fear, which has spawned many children. More of them lurk around than the Gerasene pigs that Christ sent to their deaths by cliff-jumping. Most often I avoid these piggy kids by pretending they belong to someone else: Ms. Messy Housekeeper, for instance, belonged to a late cousin. But that’s as useless as pretending they don’t exist.

These offspring of Fear, which block my resolutions to play mandolin every day and lift weights every other day, are: Ms. I’m Too Tired (a twin of Ms. O So Sleepy), Ms. Self-Pity, and Ms. I Can’t Move A Muscle. Fear has also spawned such ugly brats as Miss Pain, Miss Paralysis, Ms. Lifeless, Ms. Cannot, Ms. Will Not, and Ms. I Have to EAT NOW. Ms. Unwitting also comes to mind.

Locking up these naughty youngsters is counter-productive; they’ll simply break out now and then throughout the new year. A better action, as I recognize each of them, is to banish them to a different playground, so that they will not knock down yet another mandolin practice or weight-
lifting session.

The strongest child of Fear, almost as hard to manage as her brothers and sisters, is Ms. Overwhelming Ambition, who attacked when I began to write this essay. Ms. O.A. suggested that it’s silly to try to write anything for a newspaper anyway and that a better gambit would be to plan to write a poem a day, preferably a villanelle, for the next year.

I am also sending Ms. O.A. to a different playground, perhaps The Atlantic?