The Fear of Falling

The ladder has rungs going down.

We forget this. We spend our lives climbing, eyes fixed upward, measuring progress by how many people sit below us. But the ladder continues past our feet. Past our grandparents' feet. Past the floor we thought was solid. All the way down into rooms we've trained ourselves not to see.

The middle class lives suspended between two terrors: the fear of never rising and the fear of falling. But it's the second fear that wakes you at three in the morning. The first is disappointment. The second is annihilation.

I learned this at thirty-four, when the magazine I wrote for folded. Not my fault. Not anyone's fault. The internet had eaten another print publication, the way it was eating everything in 2009. One day I had a salary and health insurance and an editor who returned my calls. The next day I had severance and COBRA and a LinkedIn profile I didn't know how to use.

The money wasn't the worst part. The worst part was running into colleagues at coffee shops and watching their faces rearrange when they heard. That careful combination of sympathy and relief. *There but for the grace of God.* They'd buy my coffee and promise to keep their ears open, and I'd walk home knowing they were already forgetting my name.

This is what no one tells you about falling: it's contagious. People step back like you're carrying something they might catch.

Lily Bart falls for 350 pages.

Edith Wharton constructs her descent like an architect, each step precisely calibrated. The genius of *The House of Mirth* isn't that Lily loses everything. It's that she loses it one floor at a time, always landing somewhere that seems survivable until it doesn't.

She begins at Bellomont, the Trenors' country estate. Weeks of luxury paid for by her wit, her beauty, her ability to arrange flowers and make conversation. She belongs here, or seems to. The other guests accept her as one of them.

But she owes Gus Trenor money. She let him invest for her—a polite fiction that covers what is essentially a loan she can't repay. When she refuses his advances, he withdraws his protection. The invitations to Bellomont stop coming.

She lands at her aunt's house. Respectable, but duller. The parties are smaller. The conversation circles subjects she doesn't care about. But it's still the same world, the same class. She tells herself it's temporary.

Then her aunt dies and leaves her ten thousand dollars. Not the fortune Lily expected. Just enough to torment her with its insufficiency. She could live modestly on the income forever. But modestly means admitting what she is: genteel poor. The performance would end.

She falls to Carry Fisher's world. Still society, but the wrong kind. New money, loud money, people who made their fortunes last week and might lose them tomorrow. She becomes a social secretary, paid to introduce climbers to establishment. It's work, which marks her. But it's work that keeps her in the game.

This is the middle-class trap perfectly captured. Lily can't reimagine her life because she can only imagine one life worth living. She's been trained since birth to want what she wants. The training goes deeper than thought. It lives in her bones, her reflexes, the way she holds a teacup.

From Carry Fisher's, she falls to the Gormers. From the Gormers to Norma Hatch, a divorcée from the West trying to buy her way into society. Each landing is softer than homelessness but harder than the last. Each asks her to pretend a little less, to work a little more, to show the seams of her position.

She ends in a milliner's shop, trimming hats for the women she used to know. They come in and don't recognize her. Or worse, they do recognize her and pretend not to. She works twelve-hour days for wages that barely cover her boarding house room.

The fall from Bellomont to the boarding house takes less than two years.

Charles Dickens knew this terror from the inside.

His father was a clerk, respectable middle class, until he wasn't. Debt was a living thing in Victorian England. It could reach out and grab you, drag you from your home to debtors' prison, make you disappear.

When Dickens was twelve, they took his father to Marshalsea Prison. The family followed—that's what you did, moved into the prison with your debtor rather than try to survive outside. But someone had to work. Someone had to pay for food, for the cell, for the possibility of eventual release.

They sent Charles to a boot-blacking factory. Six days a week, ten hours a day, pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish. His hands turned black. His back ached. He worked alongside orphans and street children who couldn't spell their own names.

This is what haunted Dickens forever: not the poverty itself, but the visibility of the fall. He'd been marked for better things. He'd been in school, learning Latin, preparing for a profession. Now he sat in a window where passersby could watch him work, a middle-class boy fallen into the working class, the boundaries revealed as tissue paper.

He wrote about it obsessively, but never directly. David Copperfield washing bottles. Pip pumping bellows at the forge. Oliver Twist asking for more. Always the same story: the child who doesn't belong here, who was meant for something better, who might at any moment be recognized and rescued or recognized and destroyed.

In *Great Expectations*, Pip lives in constant terror that someone will see through his performance. He's been lifted from the forge to London, from blacksmith's apprentice to gentleman. But the forge clings to him. It's in his hands, his vowels, the way he holds his knife.

When Joe visits him in London, Pip's shame is unbearable. Not because Joe is crude—Joe is actually dignified, more naturally noble than the gentlemen Pip imitates. The shame comes from what Joe represents: the proof that Pip's transformation is reversible. That he could slide back down as easily as he rose.

I was conscious of a sort of dignity in the look," Pip observes of Joe, but he can't help adding: "I had never seen him look so well as at his own forge." The message is clear: stay where you belong, or risk becoming nothing.

The American middle class lives Pip's terror every day.

We're all three missed paychecks from disaster. That's not hyperbole. The Federal Reserve reports that 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense. These aren't the poor. These are people with jobs, cars, 401(k)s. People who look stable from the outside.

But middle-class life requires maintenance. The car needs insurance and gas and registration and inspection. The house needs heat and electricity and water and internet—internet isn't optional when your kid's homework lives in the cloud. The job needs clothes that don't show the wear, shoes that don't show the miles, a phone that receives emails after hours.

Miss one payment and the penalties begin. Miss two and they compound. Miss three and the infrastructure starts collapsing. The car gets repossessed, which means you can't get to work, which means you can't make the house payment, which means—

The floor is closer than we think. And below the floor, another floor. And below that, the place we've trained ourselves not to imagine: the shelter, the food bank, the nephew's couch, the car in the Walmart parking lot.

This is why middle-class anxiety vibrates at a different frequency than working-class struggle. The poor know where they stand. They've made their peace with limitation, developed systems for survival. But the middle class lives in constant performance, maintaining appearances that maintain access that maintains the illusion of security.

One crack and the whole thing shatters.

So we cling.

We take jobs we hate to keep insurance we might need. We buy houses we can't afford in neighborhoods with good schools. We lease cars that project stability, success, the impression that we belong here.

We tell ourselves it's for the children. And partly it is. We remember our own climb—or our parents' climb, or their parents'—and we know what it cost. The humiliations swallowed, the desires deferred, the careful calculations at every grocery store. We don't want that for them.

But mostly we cling for ourselves. Because we know what Lily knew: in America, you are your class position. Lose it, and you lose more than money. You lose your friends, your community, your sense of who you are. You lose the story you've been telling about your life.

The terror isn't poverty. It's the meetings where everyone discusses vacations you can't take. It's your teenager understanding why she can't have what her friends have. It's running into your old colleague at Whole Foods when you're shopping at Aldi.

It's becoming visible as what you've always feared you were: someone hanging on.

What if we let go?

Not romantically. Not "voluntary simplicity" or "downshifting" or any of the other terms that make economic necessity sound like a lifestyle choice. But actually releasing the death grip on a class position that's killing us to maintain.

What if Lily had taken the ten thousand and moved to a small town? Opened a shop, maybe. Taught French to farmers' daughters. Married the local doctor who didn't know about Bellomont and wouldn't have cared.

She couldn't imagine it. Neither can we. The programming runs too deep.

But somewhere below the floor we fear lies another possibility: solid ground. Not the life we planned, but a life that doesn't require performance. Not the friends we're trying to keep, but people who knew us before and after. Not the story we're telling, but the truth.

The ladder has rungs going down. What if that's not a threat but a door?

What if the thing we're clinging to is the thing that's drowning us?

The fall isn't death. The fear of falling is.