Pretend Brave

As a child, I didn’t even like to go out to dinner. I didn’t want to go someplace new, someplace where there were people I didn’t know, people I would have to eat in front of.

Even Mickey D’s was scary. I was happier at home with peanut butter and jelly, thank you very much.

Fall was my favorite season. Summer, not so much, although I loved the pool and the beach and the sun. In summer, I would be expected to go places and do things—and there would be lots of other people going places and doing things. In the fall and winter, it was acceptable to stay inside and be quiet, and it seemed the rest of the world was much more reasonably quiet and contained.

In fifth grade, I went to a new school—a public school, my fi rst one. I had to change classes. The girls were reading Judy Blume books, and anxiously awaiting their periods. My mom chose one of those dreaded morning rides to school in her wide maroon Oldsmobile to begin the discussion—you know the one—about what a period was and how it would happen even though I was a skinny little stick figure with nary a bit or a blip of woman showing up yet. I cried. Hard.

And every day I sat with my brown bag lunch, wanting Tater Tots from the cafeteria line behind the big white cement wall, but not daring to go back there. I mean, how did it work, after all? What if they gave me carrots—or fish? What if I looked dumb?

Growing up for me was a process of learning to be a little bit brave— or at least learning to pretend. Something my father said once changed my life. This was after college (in which I did master the still-rather-terrifying cafeteria), after I’d taken my first job. I was talking about wanting to meet the writer Madeleine L’Engle, how that was one of my dreams, and he said, “Well, what are you going to do to make that happen?”

Something inside me snapped, in the best possible way. I realized then that I could live my dreams, or I could just talk about them. And I became afraid that if I didn’t do something, I would grow old having actually done nothing. I wasn’t married, I didn’t have kids (the future I had always expected for myself), and anything else that was going to happen I had to make happen myself.

So I signed up for a writers’ retreat with Madeleine L’Engle for three years in a row. She broke her hip and then was unable to travel for various reasons, and then stopped traveling altogether, so I never met her. But I came very close.

Then I went to Paris on my own, with just the barest of French, just because I dreamed of a romantic solo trip. I gripped the arms of my seat as the plane took off. I thought I might throw up. The next morning, a dignified good-looking Frenchman was blowing me kisses over my omelet, as I tried to be terribly polite to the waitress. “Merci, madame” for the coffee, “Merci, madame” for the water, “Merci, madame” for the croissant. (I think I was as solicitous as a schoolchild.) I spent the rest of the trip terrified and elated, with a crowd of tourists in Monet’s full-bloomed garden at Giverny, wearing something apparently too short to the ballet at the Palais Garnier, staving off panic attacks on the Metro. (I did try to get off at the wrong side of the train a couple times, pushing the button to try to get the doors to open—doors which led only to precipitous drops and more sets of tracks. I felt dumb. I got over it.)

Later I was telling my friend Dee how one of my dreams was to hike the Grand Canyon. She said, “Really, want to go over Thanksgiving?” My heart dropped. Was this another dream I would have to actually do? It was. At 27, I bought a pack and broke in my boots with 50 miles of walking and learned the intricacies of going to the bathroom off-trail—one of my all-time greatest fears. I got to know the canyon intimately—its quiet trails, sleeping on a ledge in a side canyon under a nearly full moon, hot afternoons and freezing nights.

I was terrified of scorpions—my guidebook said not to worry, you could hike through the intense pain. The snakes were much more dangerous. Two years later, walking into Montana backcountry for a week carrying 40 pounds, I thought I might die somehow on the trail, stumbling into a bear during her dawn feeding, or maybe starving to death with a broken leg.

There are always fears. Perhaps for some people there aren’t, but I’m not one of those people. C.S. Lewis said every time you make a decision, you change the central part of you that chooses. He meant moral choices—whenever you choose to lie, for example, or not to lie, you change the substance of who you are and what you are likely to do the next time you have a choice to make. I think the same thing is true, though, with our lives. Every time you make a decision—to live your life, to do the things that call you—you change what you are likely to do the next time you have a choice.

Right now, I’m choosing to live my life. I’m choosing to pretend to be brave. The fear that used to limit me—What if someone sees me? What if I don’t know what to do?—now compels me. The big question for me, now, is What if I don’t do this? What if I regret that?

My latest adventure was following Jane Austen’s life through England. For a glorious month I wandered alone through the English countryside. I stayed at a monastery with a gorgeous garden and terrifying silent meals. (Monks happen to eat very fast, should you ever need to know.) I fell in love. I threw up. (In roughly that order.) I prayed sitting in a pew of the tiny church Jane grew up in. I got lost wandering through fields and got stuck walking in the rain on a country road and had to hitchhike, learned that nerds don’t make very good hitchhikers, and got rescued by the best cabbie in the world. I felt deliciously, wholly alive. I’m so terribly glad I learned to pretend.

Lori Smith, from Virginia, is the author of A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love and Faith. Her writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Washington Post Book World. She hopes next to conquer her fears of real Italian gelato.

~Lori Smith