Fear In Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric

On the topic of fear in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, she explores her relationship with fear, the different types of fear, and the ways people react to fear. The part that spoke to me most was when Rankine clarified the difference between emotions and feelings in terms of fear. She said that emotions have to do with someone’s first unconscious response, their instinctual reaction to something. She then explained that feelings are a bit more complicated. They’re this sort of concoction of “emotions, memories, experience, and intelligence” that shape how we react to certain situations. What drew me to this part of her writing was that it allowed for a differentiation between feelings and emotions that I had never even stopped to think about. This new found …show more content…
The first of them being my fear of failing, I would say that it has conjured itself up out of my past experiences and the energizer bunny that runs throughout my mind who’s fueled by my anxieties. In terms of my past experiences, I’ve always had a competitive nature about myself. Whether it was trying to do the best grande jeté in my ballet class (by the way, I could never do it perfectly and that frustrated the hell out of me) or being perceived as the most responsible out of my siblings, I’ve always had this underlining notion in my head that I had to be the best and failure was not an option. It seemed as if I had magnified the pressure to do well so much in my head that it became less of a healthy competitive drive, and more of a fear of receiving disapproval from others. This was the point in my refection where I had sort of an awakening. You see, it wasn’t failure that I was afraid of, it was disapproval. I then searched through my past experiences to find that I’ve always unconsciously sought out approval in