Fear, body and identity

Last Friday, I went to the School of Global and International Studies for a workshop. The building that houses the school is a new one with very modern and stylish interior design. An elevator lifted me up to the third floor, but I found myself in the wrong wing of the building and I need to walk across a bridge high above ground that connects the two wings of the building. The bridge was made of glass. The fact that the glass was opaque did not alleviate the fear hidden in me when I slowly treaded on it. My reason told me this was a very safe design and it was impossible for me to fall off, but still, every nerve in me was perceiving a sense of fear. Each step of mine while walking on the bridge was filled with trepidation.

What aspects of our identities are shaped by pain and fear? This is a question asked by Jay Lemke in his article--Identity, Development and Desire as he suggests that this is not an adequately addressed issue in identity research. He points out that “the maintenance and development of identity is always also a material process, however symbolically mediated it may be by the value systems and cultural meaning relations of a ‘figured world’, and that our identities are built in response to the desires and fears that are either primordial or cultivated by our cultural worlds.

Then how is the fear of the bridge part of my identity? I asked myself. Firstly, the bridge lifted me three stories above ground to a height far beyond my usual comfort zone. Secondly, the bridge is made of glass, a material I have long learned to associate with fragility. These factors undermined my sense of safety by threatening the materiality of my body. I feared the pain and death associated with dropping down from the seemingly fragile bridge.  The fear therefore characterizes me as a ground-level dweller who has learned to appreciate the soundness of rocks and wood. However, there is still another implication of the fear: it distinguishes me as an outsider, as opposed to a frequenter of this building. As far as I have observed, those who study or work in this building just sauntered or marched on the glass floor of the bridge, without a slight concern of their safety. Their sense of safety was probably reassured and validated by countless times of practice—walking on it several times a day. The primordial fear as I had experienced must have dissipated over time. This constant interaction with the landscape and artifacts of their vicinity that helped them overcome the sense of vulnerability also established them as the insider of this space.

The fear of the glass bridge now reminds me of the same fear I experienced four years ago when I was for the first time transplanted from my home country, a comfort zone I had immersed myself in for four decades, into a world totally anew to me. At that time, I always woke up from bad dreams in the middle of the night, not knowing who and where I was. I had exactly the same metaphorical fear of stepping on a glass bridge overlooking an unfathomable abyss.  

In both cases, the fear that mediates between the old comfort zone that shaped my old self and the new unknown world that is going to shape my new self mobilizes me to think who I am. The fear enables me to question the multiplicity of my identities, in so far as fear is as geo-spatially cultivated, as it is socially, culturally and historically shaped and developed. We are what we fear, we are what we desire.

Reference

Lemke, J. L. (2008). Identity, development and desire: Critical questions. In C. R. Caldas-Coulthard & R. Iedema (Eds.), Identity trouble (pp.17-42). London: Palgrave Macmillan