Life - Fear

What do you fear?

Death?

Dying?

Loneliness?



Success.  Failure.  Effort.  The thought that you might be as lazy as you imagine yourself to be...that you might be as manic, or depressive, or as suicidal, or as crazy as you secretly fear.

Do you fear spiders, or bees?  Scorpions are pretty scary too.

Maybe you fear storms, or blistering hot weather.  Or just the sun.

How about silence.  Being left alone, with no one to talk to or hear.  With no one to listen.  Maybe you fear that nothing you say or do matters, and nobody cares.

Maybe you fear being trivialized.  That no one is taking you seriously.  Or that everyone is taking you too seriously.  Maybe you fear fun...or joy.

Maybe you fear change, change brings new things, forces you to adapt.  Forces you to think more, to do more, to give up things and accept the new.  Maybe you don't fear change at all, but you fear stagnation?  That you aren't growing, that you aren't any smarter than you can remember.

That you're faking it.

Maybe you fear that you're actually just a hack.  And any day now people will just...discover that.  They'll realize you're not beautiful, not an artist, not smart, not witty, not...good.

Maybe you fear society.  What people say about you.  What strangers think when they look at you.  What your friends talk about when you're not there.  What your parents do.

Maybe you fear the world.  War.  Politics.  The things that can't be controlled.  A stock market crash.  The housing bubble collapse.  That all the money you have saved away means nothing.  That every heated argument, every angry word carries us forward and downward towards the inevitable nuclear destruction.

Maybe you don't fear that.  Maybe that last one is just me.

Maybe you fear dying alone.  You imagine that if you died, no one would find out for a week, because no one is checking up on you, checking in, calling, or texting, or messaging.  That you might nod off on a train somewhere and no one would notice.  In the faceless expanse of our urban lifestyle, no one would check on you behind your paperback novel, head tilted against the glass...resting...sleeping.

Maybe you just fear dying.  Buried in the cold earth to quietly waste away.  What if there is no afterlife, really is no afterlife.  You are a collection of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms, there is no binding essence, no soul, no meaning.  You're just random happenstance chance of molecular adhesion and bonds, electrons and particles.  And nothing you do has any baring or meaning, nor does anyone, it's all just chance.

Maybe you fear a lot of things.

But maybe fearing things, putting voice to them is a good way to get started beating them.

Right?