Fear, A Users Guide

What do we really have to fear?

The answer is ourselves.

External stimuli can give us a fright, and unsettle us to varying degrees. They can make us sweat, and shiver, and drain us of our courage. Does this last? No, it doesn’t.

I was once mortally afraid of spiders. They simply freaked me out. The bigger ones posed no threat, they always seemed slower, and more docile. The smaller varieties, with their quick and blurred leg movements and sinister hiding places, unsettled me unduly.
One time, in a church, of all places, I had the chance to end my fear. A spider crept into view on the pew directly in front of me. Of course, I was transfixed, and hoped beyond hope that I would not have to kneel down until the spider had left my vicinity.
I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt compelled to just reach out and pick up the spider. I did, and I survived to tell the tale. Whether I had some invocation of God, or my subconscious was teaching me an invaluable lesson, it really opened my eyes. At first the spider frantically clambered over my hands. When it settled down, it began to spin a silken line between my fingers and lower itself back onto the pew.
I was unafraid. What’s more, I felt positively foolish to have let my fear control me to the point of physical repulsion.
Fear is just one more emotion in the catalogue of feelings we can experience. Granted, it is unpleasant, but not uncontrollable, such as love is. I found out how to control my fear, how to understand it, and to dissipate it. An emotion, any emotion, is just an experience. It is up to you to make the best of these experiences, however unpleasant they may be.
As I said earlier, what we have to fear most is ourselves. You can confront external stimuli, and interact with them to your ultimate benefit. What I fear most about myself is the inability to confront what lies beneath the surface of my personality. Any single person, no matter what their outward personality may be, has the potential to commit the most heinous of crimes, and the most brutal acts of violence.
Everyone has a threshold before they crack, before they revert to their primal instincts of survival.
Kill, eat, mate, protect.
Of course everyone has varying thresholds, but there is a certain situation or scenario suited to everyone, a certain series of events that will trigger the unleashing of the beast within. How far must we be pushed before the mind gives in? I fear the most for what I am capable of, what I could do so easily, yet I do not. I have control. I have morals. I have a heart.
But in madness all reason is lost, so none of these exist as we perceive them at this moment in time; in our saner moments.
Will my threshold be breached, will I abandon all reason when I’m confronted with my trigger? Who knows really, all any of us can do is hope that our true selves may never emerge.