How to Become Fearless

When I was a child, I devoured books about strong girls. Old fashioned novels about girls who lived in the woods, and who loved life with this big, abundant abandon. Girls who faced the worst life would give and rose, who were willing to be brave and unapologetically smart. I read Gone with the Wind for the first time when I was ten, and I revered Scarlett O’Hara in all her petty meanness and selfish immaturity — here was a woman bent on survival.

I consumed stories about fearless women, because I imagined that someday, I would grow into a fearless woman. This word — for me, it was a world unto itself.

I think as a kid, I spent more time thinking about my identity than I did trying to create — or at least project — it. Because of that, there were a few individual words — fearlessness among them — that became so big, so prominent in my mental geography. I was this, or at least I would be, when I grew up.

There are a few moments from my life that stand as highway marker, and this is one: In the middle of my freshman year of college mental health crisis, I got lost on a city bus. I misread the schedule or misread the bus — I’m still not sure which — but I wound up getting deposited at an empty transit station, in the wrong downtown, on a street that I did not recognize.