Why I'm Not Afraid of the Monsters Under The Bed

To live authentically and fully I had to turn away from the shadows that were dogging me and embrace a life I felt like I didn't write and I didn't want. I had to learn to welcome the blistering, ego-shrinking, unattractive truth about who I'd become before I could reclaim my life. I'm going to give you the secret sauce to defeating fear, but it has nothing to do with being strong and everything to do with being real:

False 

Evidence

Appearing

Real.

Let's consider the reality of that acronym for a minute. A lot of what we face in life looks scary, sounds scary, smells scary. Around every corner is a new and thus risky, threatening vista. If the truth be told, it is our minds that interpret circumstances and people as threatening. Most of the terror we feel is manufactured by our own terrified minds. Yet fear can be the springboard that launches us into the experience of being fully alive. Author Veronica Roth said: "Fear doesn't shut you down-fear wakes you up." Jack Canfield said: "Everything you want is on the other side of fear." It isn't until you defy fear that you realize it doesn't have any teeth. Fear is like a rat with a megaphone: it's got a big mouth but it's nothing to be afraid of. Remember being a kid and the monster under the bed? It felt real, but once you looked, there wasn't anything there to hurt you. Like the monster under the bed, when you uncover your deepest fears they lose power over you. Get to the point where something else is more important than your fear. For me, that something was my daughter.

After my teen daughter took her own life in 2013, I couldn't accept her death without making something meaningful of her memory. For me, it wasn't enough to bury her and visit her grave on holidays. When there's a suicide, you're supposed to hush it up...or like a dog, kick dirt over the spot so nobody notices the mess. And although in our last years together, she was depressed and I was running out of hope for her and we were a mess together, I loved her...more than life itself. That's why I couldn't just leave flowers and walk away. If I was going to grieve I wanted to grieve in a big way, shouting as loudly as I could: DO YOU SEE? SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL. She was also tortured; but her mental illness didn't dim her magnificence one little bit. The something more important than my fear became my daughter's untold story. She was a gorgeous, smart, vivacious girl named Moriyah, who we called Mo, who scarred and marred my heart, then set it free. 

What was I so terribly afraid of, you may wonder? I was afraid to tell the truth: that I am human and therefore imperfect, and sometimes I screw up; that my life has been messy, uncertain, and just plain full of ego and sometimes, madness. The monster under the bed was myself: my own mistakes, my shortcomings and imperfections...and I wanted them to stay under the bed. I would have preferred people see the big, bad me, but it seems life had other plans. Anyone who knew Moriyah knew she would have wanted me to "keep it real," because that's the kind of down-to-earth girl she was. So I wrote a tell-all, honest-to-the-bone book about my life with her. As author Marion Crook characterized it: "Nina Bingham rips apart the façade of coping to show the devastating aftermath of a child’s suicide and how a mother, flawed but courageous, learns to live again."

When my daughter took her own life, I remember looking into the mirror and perhaps for the first time seeing what was really there instead of seeing what I wanted to see. In that clear moment, a lyric from a Michael W. Smith song came rushing back to me: "We are what we've become." It was a seering moment, a moment I'll never forget. I realized it is not our titles, our jobs, or our educations that matter; it is not our cars or houses, our social status or even our own bodies. What's most essential to creating our characters is what we consistently DO. Our behaviors dictate who we have come to be.

I had allowed myself to become a woman who was taught by my fearful and cold-shouldered lineage to hide, cover up and turn away from vulnerability, and I did it well. I'd cloaked myself in a plethora of academic degrees, yet had become so removed from my own humanity that looking back on it now, it's alarming. I thought I was super-woman and impenetrable. I'm pretty sure the Bible says: "Pride cometh before a fall." When you have a big ego, you have a long ways to fall. When she died, it felt like I fell from the Empire State Building, and the landing wasn't pretty. Since then, I've fallen many times (I have a real knack for it). Each time I scrape myself off the pavement my reaction isn't shock or justification like it used to be. Now I just smile lopsidedly and think: 'That's too much of a mess to cover up, but forgive yourself because you are a human.' I've gotten to the place where I can "own" my messes. And that's the whole point of our humanity: that we admit how un-perfect, needy and screwball we can be and ask to be loved anyway. Freedom is found in the middle of all the muck and mistakes, in our quiet forgiveness of each other. 

I'm pretty sure Moriyah would be proud if she were here today. Not of the book, but of me, because I allowed my grief to make me real. I'm not blaming the monsters anymore for my fear or failures, because I discovered that I was the only monster under my bed. I guess you could say that the tragedy I endured saved me from myself. And that's the way it's supposed to be; and truly, we are the only ones who can.

To see all of Nina's books: http://www.amazon.com/Nina-Bingham/e/B008XEX2Z0