Shaking hands with fear

Julie Elman, creator of The Fear Project, asks students what each of their fears are. In the world, fear finds ways to manifest itself anywhere and everywhere, in anyone and everyone. It molds itself like a mask to the wearer’s own anxieties. As for me, I have a list of irrational fears; they consume my mind at all different times, filling the crevices and corners with nonsense.

The ceaseless, mind-wrecking fear that has hounded me through childhood is of those colorful blobs of felt with the emotionless faces; shapes littered on the top of their thoughtless heads.

Screens mounted on their bellies and the four of them rambling on in their demonic language, those creatures are the stuff of nightmares. My stomach drops, the walls of my tear ducts shatter, the tears themselves running down my cheeks like morning dew on a window. I’m no longer able to breathe. It is like I’m a character in a Stephen King book, and the plot is written just for me. Instead of It the clown, the psychotic killers in my life novel are the Teletubbies, and instead of typical horror music playing quietly in the background, the soundtrack would be their theme song at full blast. I can imagine myself in a straightjacket, rocking in the corner of a padded room while the song played. At set intervals, the tubbies themselves would jump into the room and taunt me.

Publically, I run into the fear of escalators.

My mind turns the situation into a real-life version of Willy Wonka. My leg gets pulled into the slot alongside the steps, and I’m in the taffy stretcher. Pulled and pulled and pulled, yelling and screaming and calling for help, but no one hears me. I’m stuck in this industrial-sized taffy stretcher for the rest of my life, living under the rest of society. I am no longer an equal, but a cartoon of the stressed mind.

The only release would be the Oompa Loompas coming to rescue me from the candy-driven torture device.

Some say it would be foolish to fear the unknown- to fear oblivion. Imagine peering into an abyss, but all you see is darkness; nothing but space that is as black as the color between universes. What if this and what if that- these thoughts grasp my head daily and hinder me from living as a normal person would. My psyche morphs into one of trepidation; afraid to take chances because of the unrecognized and unacknowledged risks that may follow.

As of right now, however, my fear is writing this paper and the judgement I may receive for it.

I’ve never been the most sensational writer, I’ve just let the thoughts of my mind flow onto the pages. What if this paper I am writing right now isn’t good enough? The thought of editing and re-editing is the horror of today. I don’t know how to finish and I don’t know how to add the substance this paper needs.

My pen may be bleeding the blood of my heart and soul, but sometimes what is good enough for you, isn’t good enough for another.

In the end, my fears are of nothing to worry about. I have no shame in the idiotic  scenarios my mind has created, or the ones it will fashion in the future. Fears are only the shadows of the anxieties caused by an overactive imagination.

Let it run rampant, and do not question its motives, because fear will one day give you the strength to carry on when everything else is fading.