# Living Scared

By [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman) · 2013-04-16

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What happened yesterday in Boston so sad and awful.  And it’s deeply scary.  All of the communities I’m part of — family, work, school, city — have been shaken by this.

But the most important thing we can do coming away from this is [not get scared in our core](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-boston-marathon-bombing-keep-calm-and-carry-on/275014/).  If that happens, they win and we lose - way bigger than we lost yesterday.

I’ve been scared before — deathly scared.  For me, it was 1991-1993 when I was 12-14 years old, growing up in Brooklyn.  At that precise time, there was a lot of street crime in New York.  Pretty much everyone I knew got jumped, robbed, or beaten up doing things like walking home from school.  

For me it started when I was 12, riding my bike home from baseball practice in Prospect Park.  Two kids stopped me and relieved me of my bicycle (hand-drawn “Nick” license plate and all).  I was upset that day, and cried when I got home.  But the “terror” didn’t set in until sometime later — when I started getting harassed (usually in small ways, sometimes in larger ways) nearly every day.  

The world went from being a place to joyfully explore to being a place to be fucking terrified of.  I didn’t want to leave my house, not even to go two blocks to the grocery store.  Taking the subway home from school was a mission.  I detoured my route at the slightest sign of danger on the horizon. I was in a constant state of [condition orange](http://teddytactical.com/SharpenBladeArticle/4_States%20of%20Awareness.htm). It sucked. 

The terrorists (in my case, the kids on the street who were bigger and badder that I was) totally won. I hated it. I wanted to get as far away from NYC as fast as I could.   And in fact, by the end of high school, that’s exactly what I did (even though things were better by then).

I lived for years — a small number of years, but formative ones — in terror.  And when I got through with it I vowed never to live that way again.

Part of what makes it possible to live without terror is to **be in it together**.  If my 1992-era self had had a bigger posse (no offense, [Dave](https://twitter.com/cacarillo); we did what we could), things would have been different, easier.  

I don’t mean that we need to be in a constant state of vigilance together — rather, we need to be there to help each other [keep calm and carry on](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-boston-marathon-bombing-keep-calm-and-carry-on/275014/).  We — people in the US and elsewhere who don’t want to live in fear — have to be each others’ posse, coach, shoulder, and heart.

I refuse to be scared by this.

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*Originally published on [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman/living-scared)*