I have a two words tattooed on my right
wrist. “No Fear”, a simple message for which I have received
equal amounts of scorn and praise. The scorn is meaningless to me but
the tattoo means a lot. It's a reminder on days when everything I'm
trying to accomplish doesn't seem worth it for the struggle of what
I've already overcome and also a tribute to someone who I knew once
who was a truly fearless person.
As a kid I had many fears and phobias,
some that if people who know me now knew me then, they wouldn't
believe it. I hardly believe it, looking back but I know it was
true. I also had nightmares and night terrors often. I'm not sure if
my plethora of fears came from the nightmares or my nightmares came
from the fears but I can't even remember the last time I had
something that could be called a nightmare.
I don't remember ever consciously
making a choice to face my fears and eliminate them one by one but
now I only have a handful of fears that leave me with a general sense
of uneasiness. I have to deal with these because some of them prevent
me from achieving things I still want to do with my life.
When people ask me how to face fears,
I feel the best way is to pretty much throw yourself into a situation
where you have np choice but to deal with it, but that's not an easy
thing to do. I also don't want people putting themselves in
potentially deadly and dangerous situations, trying to follow my
advice.
An approach people seem to think will
help is evaluating why they are afraid of something. In my opinion
people spend way too much time evaluating and analyzing every little
detail of their life. It's okay to evaluate every now and again but
strong, irrational emotions like love and fear are not worth trying
to break down. Your brain (yes brain, not heart, that's a just a
muscle spazzing out and getting shocked constantly by signals from
your brain – it's not guiding you in anyway) is doing some fuckery
which is causing these things called feelings. Your brain is always
up to some fuckery, for good or bad who really knows.
I don't see people trying to
understand tastes, I mean everyone seems to accept that they like and
don't like things. I see fear similarily, you can overcome fears like
you can develop a palette for certain flavours but you don't need to
spend months looking as why you like and don't like certain foods to develop a liking for new flavours.
If throwing yourself at the fear isn't
an option and you want to try to find a way to deal with it than I
think small victories make a huge difference. Say it's dealing with
spiders. Start with naming ones you see (people bond to things with
names), sit in a room with one or near a web outside, take time to
watch their movements (their interesting creatures to watch – but
I'm strange that way). Eventually you should just start being
comfortable with them. I hold them in my hand with no problems. The
feelings of fear and disgusts start to dissolve when understanding
starts happening. Anyway that's my approach.
I mentioned earlier that I need the
reminder even if I tend not to be afraid of things. I need it because
overcoming fear is an accomplishment and people hardly ever give
themselves as much credit for an accomplishment as they do criticism
for a failure. You should always acknowledge when you do something
right, but not to the point of being an ass about it. I give myself a
lot of criticism for not meeting the high standards I set for myself
but I'm acknowledging that I have some worthwhile abilities I should
recognize more often. Self-respect is hard to achieve.
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