Beards and rucksacks

Years ago, I worked as a teacher of English on a Greek island. It was unsettling for the first six months when some people who didn't know me would cross the road from me, or hiss 'whore' as I passed. Sometimes men would try to grope me, or pester me. Eventually I worked out why: it was because I was English and they thought I was a tourist and therefore a slut, especially as I was a woman who had come out to the island alone. I was 23 years old. I didn't know what to do. I felt upset and angry. I reacted at first by mostly hanging out with the other English teachers, and I did not make many Greek friends unless I knew them through work or had been introduced, because I felt afraid and defensive. I dressed respectably and had a job at an Greek-owned independent school where I taught all ages from eight to sixteen years. I even worked for the Greek national examination board marking students for oral exams. But in the eyes of many people, I was a foreigner and so a whore and should be ostracised.

By the time I left, a year later, it had calmed down and I was generally accepted in the town. But I never forgot what it felt like to be such an outsider, and how my response was to shrink away, feeling ashamed and angry. I thought of this experience again today when I read a BBC magazine article about being an Asian man with a beard in London: Travels with my Beard

Being hissed at in the streets of Evia and thought a tart for six months was one thing, being thought a terrorist or murderer, another. I have tried to imagine what it must be like to live in London and deal with the stop-and-searches, the suspicious glances, the spaces left next to you on the tube and the bus. The hurt and anger that would build up in me if it kept happening to me.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I still get panic reactions on the tube, with a particularly bad one happening last week when I was honestly convinced I was going to die. There was no bomber on my carriage, but I had to get off the train because my body reacted as if it was about to be bombed and went into shock. When found myself still alive on the platform at Russell Square, shaking, I wanted to apologise to the bearded Asian man with the rucksack. Of course, I couldn't, the train had moved on, the man still on it, surrounded by crowds of other passengers. I don't know whether they were nervous as well. I don't know whether he felt nervous. I felt awful; guilty, shakey, weepy, ashamed.

Some tube journeys are worse than others. Last year, I was encouraged and cheered by Jag's post about being a dark-skinned man with a rucksack. For weeks I felt almost normal and I thought: I am better.

Then, bang, back in the panic zone. Right now, I find that Asian men with beards and rucksacks on a train is a massive challenge again. Seven months after July 7th, I find it very hard to control my physical response when I travel on a crowded rush hour tube. If a dark-skinned bloke - with a rucksack gets on - the panic-dial goes up to eleven. I try not to show my fear. It embarrasses me.

A few weeks ago, as I jumped up from my seat I forced myself to smile apologetically at the young man I was panic-reacting to. I probably looked like a maniac, sweaty, quivering, with a wide-eyed, rictus grin. He looked a bit scared of me. I was hot with shame as well as fear as I jumped off the bus.

I now go to NHS cognitive-behavioural therapy sessions for travel fear which I started in December. It is helping with some of the feelings I have. However, I am still specifically scared of rucksack-carrying men on tubes. I have established this reaction occurs when I am in a confined space, especially in a crowded tube carriage. I went to the Muslim demo a few weeks ago and got into conversations with several young Muslims ( with or without beards, several carrying rucksacks,) in Trafalgar Square. So above ground I am fine and I can also trust my reactions in buildings, in shops, restaurants, offices, bars and cars.

All this bloody liberal angst: I have had nasty anonymous comments left on the blog accusing me of being a racist after I wrote about the experience on the tube last week. I deleted them, which is what I have started doing with anonymous insults on my personal blog: I don't see why I should put up with trolls. I did want to address the accusation though, because it is something of an uncomfortable subject.

Racist adj 1: based on racial intolerance; "racist remarks" 2: discriminatory especially on the basis of race or religion [syn: antiblack, anti-Semitic, anti-Semite(a)] n : a person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others [syn: racialist]

Am I a racist in the way I view the world? Is my reaction on tubes, racist? I think it is a fear reaction, not a racist reaction. I am reacting to a percieved, physically-experienced threat, not a race or religion. I will sit next to an older Muslim man or a Muslim woman of any age on the tube because I don't have any fear of them. I walk around London avoiding dark alleys, dodgy minicabs, on the look out for nutters like any other Londoner with a degree of street-sense, but feeling generally unpeturbed. I am very wary of youths if they look like they might approach me on the street, and will cross the road to avoid them, but that is a basic self-defence reaction of most women I know in London. I am frightened to open my door at night. But, well, that's because I was attacked before, in 2002, by a youth who followed me home and then rang my door at night and then attacked me and left me for dead. Yeah, yeah, I know. Random. Unlucky.

If I had been attacked and badly bitten by an Alsatian dog, as my friend was many years ago, I might well have a similar life to hers: she does not walk in parks where dogs run off the lead, she avoids dogs and crosses the road if she can to avoid them. And if she sees an Alsatian, she still has a violent physical, shaking, fearful reaction. Even though she is a very bright woman and she knows that just because one Alsatian mauled her, not all of them are about to do so.

It's all quite depressing and sad, and worrying. Many people in London were more jumpy after July 7th, whatever race or religion they were, despite us saying 'we are not afraid'. These feel like fearful times. And fear sells papers and strengthens governments' hands. But I know this: I don't want to be afraid, I don't like it, and I am doing what I can to overcome it; getting on the tube as often as I can, seeing the therapist, engaging with people and trying to move through the fear and past the fear and out the other side.

Fear is disabling. It makes us rigid, intolerant, stunts our enjoyment of life. I'm going to keep going: the more times I get on trains and arrive safely then the more I learn that it is only fear after all, the shadow of last summer brushing me, but not real, not now, not any more.