As y'alls may be aware, tomorrow is Halloween!
It's so weird. It feels like October just started. Clearly not.
I thought it would be appropriate to write about fears today.
Muhahaha!
Humans have a built-in alarm system to warn them of when there will possibly be danger. Without it, I don't think we would have survived thus far. I mean, if you weren't afraid when you're staring down a hungry lion, you might not think to, I don't know, run for your life. Although it is scary, fear is crucial to being human.
Now, we also develop irrational fears. Irrational fears, I believe, are spawned from traumatic experiences and mental associations when the mind is still very impressionable. For instance, if a bird attacked you when you were a child, you may develop the fear of birds, or ornithophobia. In the future, when you see a bird, you may be afraid that it will attack and injure you. If, say, a baby heard a loud crash while being first exposed to a fuzzy bunny, they may develop the fear of bunnies or fuzzy things. That may be because they associated a scary crashing sound with bunnies or fuzzy things.
It's a strange thought, right?
So I asked myself, "What am I most afraid of?"
I wasn't able to come up with a definitive answer. So perhaps I'll just write and discover it in this post
On the surface, I have small fears such as the fear of spiders. Well, I'm actually that scared of spiders. I'm fascinated by them. I'm just grossed out by the thought of squashing them with my hands or having them crawling into my mouth when I'm asleep (which, by the way, they usually don't do--spiders are sensitive to vibrations, and humans vibrate quite a lot while sleeping because we breathe, have a beating heart, snore, etc.).
So I'm digging deeper. What's scarier than a spider? I guess a large workload. At the moment, I am running away from my responsibilities (oops...) to write this post. Don't worry, I'll go work in a bit, haha. But large workloads genuinely frighten me. Today, I looked at the amount of work I needed to do, and I felt like shrinking/disappearing into thin air/not existing anymore. Or maybe I'm not afraid of the work. Maybe I'm actually afraid of what will happen if I didn't finish all of my work. Anyways, I know that this is not my deepest fear, so I'm moving on.
It's difficult to think of my deepest darkest fear, you know? There are so many things out there. I'm afraid of wrecking my health, mentally and physically. I'm afraid that I'll lose my friends. I'm afraid of breaking the bonds that I currently have. I'm afraid of being associated with the wrong people and the wrong things, and being punished for it. I'm afraid of being rejected. I'm afraid of embarrassing myself in front of others. But these fears are so small. These are things that I can get over. I honestly cannot think of "my one greatest fear." There isn't something that would make me the most afraid because most of my fears hold the same level of scariness.
Maybe the reason as to why I am unable to think of my greatest fear is because I'm too afraid to even acknowledge the fear. Maybe there's a barrier in my brain protecting me from crawling into a corner and rocking myself back and forth, never to leave that position. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
But you know, even with this fear, I'm functioning (somewhat). The world goes round and it won't stop going round if I discover my deepest fear, conquer it, or never find out what it is.
Do you even have any fears? Why do you think you have those fears? Have you discovered your greatest fear?