writing – Page 3 – Gonzo With the Wind

Tuesday is upon us, at long last. A home office workday has come to an end and the evening gig is but three hours away – just enough time for me to spew out some thoughts.

On the 27th of last month, I came to the realisation that something had to change. I needed to revamp my website, get an email address suitable for an adult female, start letting go of the things that no longer serve me (like the millions of threadbare band tees taking up space in my closet, so littered with holes they make the infamous emperor’s new clothes seem less revealing) – the time had come to fix my life. Yet, it’s taken me almost three weeks to justify shelling out the three bucks for a domain name I decided on back in 2014.

I should explain that this is not a unique event. These eureka moments occur at least thrice a year. BUT. The thing is, whenever I have thought something through, I always (almost without fail) end up overanalysing and ruminating until there’s very little left of the original idea and I’ve lost track of what was so great about it in the first place. Yet, spending hundreds of pounds in one transaction at Boots (or equivalent) doesn’t make me bat an eyelid. In fact, historically, my lack of impulse control in that department has been rather shocking.

So why – OH WHY?! – have I been unable to trust and listen to myself when I know in my gut exactly what I want and need to do (or, what I do NOT need or want, for that matter)? The need to meditate was hanging over me like a raincloud, so I ventured out on what was to become my fastest half marathon in three years, with only three Haribo Happy Cherries (my drug of choice) for sustenance and two hours worth of podcast episodes in my ears. The result? One very delighted and surprised middle-aged sweat-machine with a sore hip, fully determined to start cracking on that decade old to do list.

Incidentally, I think I cracked the code on that whole thing with the “ADHD super power”. When they mistakenly claim hyper focus, or their ability to make tough decisions when faced with potentially life-threatening scenarios, to be a super power, when in fact these symptoms are merely a conduit for the real super power; the masking of symptoms.

I got the idea from something someone said on a podcast about dyslexia and how some people would mask their difficulties by for instance learning a text by heart so that they could recite it in class, rather than reading it out. In much the same way, I taught myself to ‘take photos’ of pages in books that never spoke to me (trigonometry, anyone?), so that I could pull the images out whenever I had a test. As a defense mechanism, I effectively gave myself a photographic memory.

Perhaps I’ll write more on this next week. I haven’t decided yet. I might write about perimenopause. Either way, I’ve gone full gonzo. Gonzo With the Wind! Perhaps it is time to conclude this post.

Why menoPAUSE when you can menoFINISH, amirite? Ha. I jest. See you next Tuesday.

In the meantime, you can listen to the inimitable David Eugene Edwards and his Wovenhand on Bandcamp by clicking anywhere on this sentence.

Last week, I said I would write a little something about fear in my next post. And I will. Now, my initial thought was to write about the fear of success. But after an intense re-watch of series one through five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and a traumatising reintroduction to the alien fear demon from space. Ick!), I thought to myself; why complicate things? I’ll just write about fear, full stop.

If you, like me, still remember the far too brief heyday of Crystal Pepsi, you may at some point during the early 90s have been glued to the TV set every time Are You Afraid of the Dark? was on. I loved it. Plenty of jump scares, but the stories were just far-fetched enough that you wouldn’t lose any sleep over having watched them. Around the same time, though, another show reared its ugly head; The X-Files. Also very much supernatural in character, but the show was so well written that you didn’t need too much persuasion before you believed the stories to be true – apart, perhaps, from the episode with the insects. The Smoking Man did it for me. This was the real deal – the aliens were coming to get us.

Anyway…

What really freaked me out with The X-Files was the fact that it had too many real aspects to it – the more episodes I watched, the more convinced I became that these scenarios could easily play out in real life. It was starting to instil a fear in me, that maybe the government wasn’t paying attention. Or maybe they were hiding the truth? It was all too much for my 11 year old brain. It was starting to affect my ability to think straight. Just when the hormones started to kick in as well. A recipe for disaster – good thing I was too young to vote at the time. Anyway. This sort of brings me to my point, but I’ll chuck in a definition of fear before I go any further.

In an article entitled The Psychology of Fear, Lisa Fritscher writes:

“Psychologists define fear as a protective, primal emotion that evokes a biochemical and emotional response. Fear alerts us to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological. Whereas the biochemical changes that fear produces are universal, emotional responses are highly individual.” (VeryWellMind.com, October 2025)

These biochemical changes equal the flight or fight response. For those of us partial to a good horror film, our emotional response might be equal to the feeling we get when we’re excited – a sort of ‘good’ irrational fear, if you may. We love the jump scares. An article on Inspire the Mind claims that “When we experience “recreational” or “staged” fear, our brain releases dopamine, a feel-good hormone associated with feelings of pleasure”. This view is supported by many other articles linking horror movies and enjoyment – there’s a particularly good one on everydayhealth.com.

Dopamine is like a drug – you’ll be wanting it again. I wonder if there’s any research on whether or not there’s a link between horror fans and ADHD, as the low dopamine levels in such individuals may be causing inattentiveness? I suppose the same would apply to adrenaline junkies. But I digress. And I’m no neurologist.

So, we know that fear activates the fight or flight response. What, then, when fear is planted as a seed and cultivated over time? Instead of a jump scare, that induces said response and goes away once the imminent “danger” is gone, it festers, breeds desperation and develops into something that changes our behaviour, our beliefs, our way of life. Real fear. Real fear affects our ability to think straight. Real fear is what makes us vote for the wrong political candidate.

Oops, another digression.

My point is this; what is instilled in us over time can be just as scary, but instead of shocking us into action, we get wee droplets of ‘proof’ that sustains the fear and makes us paranoid. In politics, this is called soft power tactics. Basically, it’s gaslighting. Fear mongering. Whatever you want to call it. The work of a sociopath.

It’s like the first movie in the Paranormal Activity franchise – the first 70 minutes is just build-up, where they play to your subconscious, making you go on high alert by using subtle noises and music – when that duvet is finally pulled from the bed by an unseen force (which isn’t that scary, if you think about it), you’re already terrified because you’ve been at the edge of your seat waiting for something to happen, because someone has told you that it will. You are no longer in control of your biochemical responses. I’d wager it’s not the scene itself that causes us to jump at it – and stay on alert for the duration of the movie – I think it was the shock coming from the fact that we’d gone waaaaaay past the point of no return for us to shut the stupid thing off.

Sustained fear. Can’t be good.

Ending on a serious note here, but… It’s almost midnight. To be continued, I suppose?

See you next Tuesday. Until then, watch yourself around the thinning of the veil or whatever. Don’t take candy from strangers. Eat you vegetables. Buy my book. And, remember what Betty Ann said:

“If you’re really into a story, you become part of it and you start to imagine what horrible thing might be sneaking around the corner, ready to pounce. It’s your imagination that gets you into a story, and unless you’re very careful, you might need your imagination to get you out.”

Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Season 3: The Tale of the Bookish Babysitter

Tag: writing

Rumination, rebranding and other disasters

Fear: From flight or fight to soft power sorcery