What Have You Learned to Be Afraid Of?

Today I headed out alone into the forest to pick mushrooms for the first time.
I’ve picked berries many times, but never mushrooms — partly because my mum is a big berry picker, so that was always our thing every autumn, and she rarely, if ever, picked mushrooms. My dad hates them. So in a way, it’s inherited.

But I also realised how much fear there is around mushrooms — some valid, some not.

For instance, did you know that the fly agaric (flugsvamp) is poisonous if eaten raw — but if you dry it and heat it to 70 °C for an hour, it can actually have healing properties? If that’s true for one of the most infamous poisonous mushrooms, what might be true for the others?

As I walked deeper into the forest, another fear surfaced: getting lost. The forest I’d chosen is near where my mum grew up. You drive down a road marked “public road ends here” (allmän väg slutar här), and it turns into a narrow gravel road. I parked where it felt right and just started walking straight in.

After about twenty minutes, my mind began to focus on the fear — what if I can’t find my way back? — and I realised I wasn’t even sure if the fear made sense.

It was a fairly big stretch of forest, but I knew there were meadows in two directions and the road behind me, so only one direction led into deep forest before eventually reaching another road. From road to meadow took maybe an hour; west to east, two or three. Big — but not endless. When I reached the meadow, I realised it wasn’t big enough to truly get lost in. With the sun as a guide and modern tools in my pocket, I saw that this fear, too, was inherited — not tested.

This morning, a friend and I talked about these inherited fears — it’s been a theme for me lately. And I realised another one: my fear of meeting a man of foreign descent on a dark road.
It’s uncomfortable to admit, but it’s there. And the irony is, in another crowd, that same man is usually the hottest one in the room 😉

Turns out, this fear has been carefully cultivated. Back in 2013, Swedish far-right groups ran propaganda linking rape to immigration. When journalists investigated, they found the opposite:

“The most common first name among convicted rapists in Sweden is Anders.”
(Source: SVT Opinion, Högerextrema våldtäktsmyter faller på eget grepp, published Feb 12 2013)

It’s an old study, and the data may have shifted since — but the point remains. My fear didn’t come from personal experience; it came from public opinion.

Fly agaric, the forest, and foreign men in dark alleys — these are just a few of the fears I’ve noticed lately that I’ve never really questioned. They weren’t born of my own experience; they were handed to me by society, by stories, by culture.

So tell me — what fears have you discovered that you were carrying without really knowing why?

Maybe I have them too.