My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  “What do you think I did? I pretended it wasn’t my song and I got the hell out of there.”

  “And what if you had gotten up there and bombed?” he mused. “What happened the last time you performed poorly at something?”

  I mentally thumbed through the past few years of my life, but all I saw was work, a dinner here or there with Matt, the occasional summer blockbuster. “Okay, last year Matt and I went bowling and I threw ten straight gutter balls in a row.”

  “And what happened afterward?”

  “And now I don’t go bowling!” I said, exasperated. “It’s not about fear. I just don’t enjoy doing things I’m bad at.”

  “Avoidance is fear,” he said gently. “When we’re afraid of fear, we avoid situations that trigger it.”

  “But who cares if I don’t bowl or sing karaoke?”

  “The problem with avoidance is that it leaks over into other areas of our life. For instance, you’ve been avoiding new people, recreational activities, your friends—”

  I interrupted, “That last one doesn’t even make sense. I’m not afraid of my friends.”

  His voice remained patient. “No, but when our world feels out of control, we withdraw to maintain the illusion of safety.”

  I opened my mouth to object, then closed it. There was a moment of uncomfortable recognition.

  He continued: “Fear can paralyze our lives. Fear of making the wrong decision keeps us from making any decision at all.”

  The empty one-year plan on my computer popped into my head, aggressive in its blankness. Was Dr. Bob right? Had fear slowly been consuming my life without my realizing it? My mind replayed all of the times I’d said nothing during work meetings because I was worried my idea would sound dumb. The time I’d turned down the opportunity to speak on a panel because I hate public speaking. How I’d stayed at bad jobs for too long because it was easier than leaving. Even small things like paying full price at flea markets because I was uncomfortable haggling with the vendors. How many chances had I squandered? How much of my life had been about avoiding life?

  “Going back to this Eleanor Roosevelt quote,” Dr. Bob was saying. “This could be a good project for you. You should run with this!”

  “Huh?” I asked, snapping to attention. “Run with what?”

  “Start doing more things that scare you!” When Dr. Bob got excited about something, his head actually bobbed. “You need to avoid avoiding. Practice confronting your fears,” he said. “The more obstacles you overcome, the more empowered you feel, and the more you want to overcome other obstacles.”

  He had me nervous when he’d said project, but lost me completely at obstacle, a word that brought to mind climbing walls and tire mazes run by people in short shorts.

  “Couldn’t I just”—I cast about for an alternative and settled on an antianxiety medication—“take an Ativan or something?”

  “Pills are a temporary fix,” he said firmly. “What you need is a lifestyle change.”

  Lifestyle changes were for the morbidly obese. Or people who hoard newspapers until they’re so walled in by the stacks that their living space is reduced to three square feet. A lifestyle change? I mean, get serious.

  Dr. Bob’s eyes scanned my face for a moment. “Noelle, anxiety can foster depression, impair your physical health, damage your relationships, and reduce your effectiveness in the world.” His voice was concerned, rather than matter-of-fact. “But if you allow yourself to fully experience fear, eventually you’ll learn how to face it without being overwhelmed by it.”

  What could I say to that? I was trapped. If I refused, I was being an avoider. Dr. Bob didn’t wait for my response. He knew it was better to let the idea percolate. Instead, he stood up, pulling the sides of his jacket together like curtains at the end of a play—the signal that our session was over.

  “Think about this Eleanor Roosevelt idea,” he said, opening his office door. “It might be the direction you’ve been looking for.”

  On my way home, I stopped by the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. It had an entire Roosevelt section, including a number of books written by Eleanor herself. I was skeptical about this whole fear-facing idea, but Eleanor had me intrigued. I was intensely curious about her life the way I once hungered for details about Angelina Jolie. I grabbed a couple of books off the shelf and plopped down on the scratchy industrial carpeting. Her life story was so rich that she wrote three autobiographies.

  Skimming through her memoirs, I discovered that one of the most celebrated women in recent history was consumed by self-doubt as a kid. Her father, Elliott, doted on her, but one thing he had no patience for was her timidity. Because she adored him, she did her best to hide her fears from him. When she was six, the family took a trip to Italy. During a donkey ride through the mountains, Eleanor came to a steep downhill slope. She trembled with fright and refused to go forward. Elliott stared down at her and said, “You are not afraid, are you?” Fifty years later, Eleanor wrote, “I can remember still the tone of disapproval in my father’s voice.”

  But it was her mother, Anna, who planted the first seeds of doubt. “I always had the feeling from a very young age that I was ugly,” Eleanor said. She was forced to wear a back brace to correct a curvature of the spine, and she was painfully aware that her beautiful mother was embarrassed by her plainness. “I can remember standing in the door, very often with my finger in my mouth,” Eleanor recalled, “and I can see the look in her eyes and hear the tone in her voice as she said: ‘Come in, Granny.’ If a visitor was there, she might turn and say, ‘She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned that we always call her Granny.’ I wanted to sink through the floor in shame.” Anna suffered chronic migraine headaches, and Eleanor rubbed her mother’s temples for hours.

  “The feeling that I was useful,” Eleanor later said, “was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.”

  This was the problem with blogging, I thought. I’d been busy but I hadn’t felt useful. One of the quotes in Eleanor’s book that made me flinch was: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” For years I’d been paid to write gossip about people.

  I set down the autobiography and noticed the corner of another book peeping out from the pile. It was an unassuming little advice guide she wrote titled You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life. The summary on the back read: “Offering her own philosophy on living, the woman who was called First Lady to the World leads readers on a path to confidence, education, maturity, and more.” I flipped the book over and studied the photograph of Eleanor on the cover. She was in her forties, smiling gamely at the camera, swathed in a fur coat and a triple-strand pearl necklace. While not a beautiful woman, she was glamorous and confident, so different from the insecure child I’d just been reading about. I’d gone the opposite way, I realized. I’d been bold when I was younger but instead of challenging myself as I grew older, I’d simply eliminated the threatening things in my life. Deciding Eleanor’s life story was something I needed to digest more fully, I gathered the autobiographies and advice book and headed to the cash register.

  The next day at the coffee shop I blew through You Learn by Living in one sitting. Upon finishing, I turned back to the chapter titled “Fear—The Great Enemy” and reread it carefully. Eleanor credited fear as the great motivator of her life. “I was an exceptionally timid child, afraid of the dark, afraid of mice, afraid of practically everything. Painfully, step by step, I learned to stare down each of my fears, conquer it, attain the hard-earned courage to go on to the next. Only then was I really free,” she wrote.

  I leaned back in my chair, and my gaze fell upon the chalkboard. The Eleanor quote was no longer there, having been replaced with something by Maya Angelou. I’d memorized it anyway: Do one thing every day that scares you. If Eleanor determined her life purpose by conquering her fears, maybe it could help me figure
out my future, with the added benefit of salvaging my friendships and reviving my relationship. Maybe to find out what I did want to do, I first had to do the things I didn’t want to do. At the very least, conquering a fear each day would give me a goal to meet, a sense of purpose.

  When I was reading You Learn by Living, I felt like Eleanor was talking directly to me: “The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans.”

  “How long would you do it for?” Matt asked when I called him with the idea.

  As a blogger I’d had deadlines every half hour, and my work had always felt careless and unfinished. Now I wanted enough time to fully devote myself to what I was doing. Time to ensure I wouldn’t return to my old habits as soon as it was over, but not so much time that I’d burn out.

  “I’ll give it a year, starting on my twenty-ninth birthday.” My thirtieth birthday seemed like a natural stopping place.

  “A year?” he repeated, sounding incredulous. “I’m all for anything that gets you out of the house, honey, but have you thought this through? How will you support yourself?” The problem with Matt being a reporter was that he was always playing devil’s advocate. The problem with me being stubborn was it made me dig my heels in even more.

  “I can make enough money freelancing to stay afloat for a while—no one’s hiring for full-time positions anyway—and I have savings.” The more I defended the idea to him, the more invested I felt in it.

  “Well, you know I’m here for you no matter what,” he said, but his voice was dubious.

  Chris was even less charitable. “It sounds a little crazy. I would hate to see you in a straitjacket, Noelle. They’re really unflattering. They just add bulk.” He added, “Though I have to admit, the idea of taking a year just to focus on me does sound pretty appealing.”

  Maybe it was crazy. Then again, our culture constantly sought lifestyle advice from celebrities, many of whom rose to fame on nothing more than sex tapes or a willingness to argue with others on camera while living in mansions provided by television networks. Wasn’t that crazy? Eleanor was more than a celebrity—she was a role model. This was an anxious girl who grew up to become a social activist and a First Lady who held regular news conferences, wrote a newspaper column six days a week, and carried a pistol. In her downtime, she helped form the United Nations and establish the state of Israel. She assisted Franklin in carrying out the New Deal. It was an experiment in which the government poured resources into various programs to restore growth and public morale.

  I told myself that this experiment could be my own New Deal: investing in myself now to create future growth. But part of me wondered if Chris was right and this was simply an exercise in self-indulgence. Shouldn’t I be serving others? Then I remembered what Dr. Bob said about anxiety reducing our effectiveness in the world. Wasn’t living a fearful life also self-indulgent? I wasn’t fully contributing to the world if I was pulling back from it all the time. Not only that, worriers are draining to other people. I didn’t want to keep dragging others down. If Dr. Bob was right about fear perpetuating fear in ourselves, my fears probably touched those I came in contact with in ways I couldn’t even comprehend.

  I went into Microsoft Word and opened up the blank document: “My One-Year Plan.” Finally I knew where to begin. I started with the things Dr. Bob and I had talked about. The bowling and the karaoke . . . what was I really afraid of there? I wrote down, “Public humiliation. Failure.” Then I thought about other things I’d been avoiding lately. My friends. Meeting new people. Public speaking.

  “Rejection,” I typed. Talking to my boyfriend about the future. “That Matt will leave me and I’ll be alone.” I paused and reread that line again, jarred by an anxiety I hadn’t previously admitted to myself. “Leaving this world with nothing to show for it but excessive knowledge of celebrity scandals.” Thinking of my lifelong fear of an untimely death, I wrote, “Leaving this world before I’m ready.”

  Words were pouring out now, the cursor gliding easily across the screen as I attempted to list every fear I’d ever had, everything I’d backed down from or taken pains to avoid. When I finally stopped writing ten minutes later, I was astounded at the amount of sheer wussiness before me. The things I had listed ranged from physical fears (heights, flying, crashing into things) to more emotional fears (public speaking, criticism, confrontation, regret, disapproval) to the slightly ridiculous (sharks, sober dancing, the time I lied and told my dad I voted for McCain).

  As I looked at the list, I saw how this could actually work. I really could confront a fear each day. Some of them could be grand gestures, like jumping off a cliff or skydiving; others could be small things, like telling someone what I really thought of them. Fear is relative. To some people, stepping on a stage is no big deal, but for me, the mere thought made my heart race. If something gave me butterflies or an inclination to flee, then it was worth trying. Just as I was about to pull up a calendar page on my computer and plot out my life for the next 365 days, I remembered something else that Eleanor said. I grabbed a book and flipped around until I found it: “You cannot use your time to the best advantage if you do not make some sort of plan,” Eleanor wrote. But she cautioned, “I find that life is much more satisfactory when it forms some kind of pattern, though I do not believe in too rigid a pattern.”

  She’s telling me not to go overboard, I thought. If you make this plan too rigid, then you’re leaving no room for spontaneity, for facing the small, everyday things that come up unexpectedly. If I planned everything out, I wouldn’t be facing all my fears, because in the last few years, I’d developed an aversion to spontaneity. I returned to my document and added one more line to the bottom of the list: “Fear of the unknown and unplanned.”

  Satisfied that I finally had, if not a plan exactly, at least a direction for my immediate future, I changed the document name to “My Year of Fear” and urged the cursor to the top of the screen. I clicked with more confidence than I’d had in months. A short message appeared across the screen: saved.

  Chapter Two

  Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can only grow as long as we are interested.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  I felt hopeful for the first time in months. I also had a birthday to plan. A few days after making the list, I was stretched out on the couch reading an Eleanor book, but my mind kept drifting to my upcoming twenty-ninth birthday. Because Matt would be at work in Albany, he was taking me out to a nice dinner the next weekend. So it would just be me and my few remaining close friends. This still left the question of the celebration. Since my birthday was the first official day of my Year of Fear, I wanted to combine the party with the scary activity. But what?

  Part of me had hoped Eleanor might inspire some ideas, but there was no mention of birthdays as I thumbed through her biographies. Instead I found myself sucked in to the drama of her privileged but joyless childhood. Her parents’ marriage was strained. Elliott drank heavily. When Eleanor was five, he caused a bit of a scandal when he fathered a child with one of the servants, who hired an attorney and threatened a $10,000 lawsuit. When Eleanor was eight, her twenty-nine-year-old mother died of diphtheria. Elliott was in a mental institution trying to overcome alcoholism, so Eleanor and her two brothers moved into their surly grandmother’s Manhattan brownstone. Five months later, her brother Elliott Jr. also died of diphtheria. Elliott and Eleanor mostly kept in touch via letters; one day the letters stopped coming. Less than two years after her mother’s death, Eleanor’s father jumped out of a window and killed himself. She and her little brother remained with Grandmother Hall and her four boisterous adult chil
dren who still lived at home. Her eccentric aunts—Maude and the unfortunately named Pussie—and her playboy uncles, Vallie and Eddie, were known for their wild shenanigans and love affairs. One day while the group was vacationing at their summer home, Vallie and Eddie parked themselves at an upstairs window with a gun and took turns firing at family members sitting on the lawn. Grandmother Hall pronounced the household too rowdy for a girl of fifteen and sent Eleanor to the Allenswood Academy, a finishing school for girls just outside London.

  The headmistress at Allenswood was a silver-haired woman named Madame Souvestre who was not to be trifled with. She was French and required the students to speak French at all times. She demanded independent thinking from her pupils. Students who turned in papers that merely summarized her lessons found their work literally torn to shreds in front of the class, the pieces thrown to the floor.

  “Why was your mind given you, but to think things out for yourself!” Madame Souvestre cried.

  I paused in my reading, trying to imagine my life at a school like that. At my high school, students had sometimes brought their children to class. One time someone dropped a backpack on the floor and the gun inside went off, hitting someone in the leg. School administrators couldn’t figure out how to ban guns, so they banned backpacks instead.

  Surprisingly, Eleanor flourished under Madame Souvestre. She engaged in lively discussions on world affairs. She tried out for field hockey despite having never seen a game and made the first team. “I think that day was one of the proudest moments of my life,” she later said.

  During school holidays, the headmistress invited her favorite student to accompany her on trips across Europe. Traveling with Madame Souvestre was “a revelation” for Eleanor. “She did all the things that in a vague way you had always felt you wanted to do.” They took unmarked paths and changed their schedule on a whim. During an evening train ride through Italy, Souvestre spontaneously grabbed their luggage and ordered Eleanor off the train. She wanted to walk on the beach and see the Mediterranean in the moonlight.