Everyone has fears. Some are rational and grounded, some are irrational and unwarranted. I, like many of my fellow people in Generation Z, have a mixture. Even if some people act fearless, there is always something that will make us turn tail and run the other way. The question is why? Fear is one of those primal instincts not programmed into only our brains, but the brains of all animals. It initiates that fight or flight response, likely triggering flight. Everyone has trouble admitting their fears, but it’s an important part of coping with them, even if you never overcome them. Let me name my five strongest fears, in ascending order. Dogs, heights, sudden loud noises, loneliness, and failure.
Dogs and heights are the easiest to explain, as they both stem from psychological trauma from my childhood. I remember that in my early years, a dog bit my hand and pierced through the knuckle on my right pointer finger, where I still have a scar today. I also remember that around the age of two, my family was at a zoo (me, my mother, sister, grandma, and grandpa) and my grandfather thought it would be funny to dangle me over a very high bridge that was over waters where crocodiles were located. How do you even get away with that in public?! I was completely still in fear because I knew if I thrashed or squirmed, my grandpa could drop me, killing me. This was the fear I had around two or three.
Let’s progress to sudden loud noises. Now, there is no sudden loud noise that I do not fear. Air horns, balloons popping, my name being called, or even gunshots. Gunshots are a big one because when I was growing up, my mother would always talk about “school shooting here” and “school shooting there”, which got me afraid that there might be one at my school. I was possibly more afraid for my life than my own mother was, which wouldn’t be a surprise for me. I was so afraid of loud noises that I would sit in the basement of our old house and just listen to the silence, and any minute noises of people walking around. Although, loud sounds pale in comparison to my fear next on the list.
Loneliness is something I’ve really experienced the second most over my entire life, and it’s one that feels even more prominent in quarantine. Now, curing loneliness is not as easy as just putting me in a place with people; not even my family. Loneliness is also a stem from a fear of abandonment. I remember that in middle school, relations between me and my stepfather were especially tense. One night, when I was in about 7th grade (12-13 years old), I had done something especially bad, and he said to me that as soon as I turned 18, I was going to be thrown out of the house and onto the streets with no help from my family. Imagine hearing at 12 years that in 6 years, you were going to be thrown out of your family and you wouldn’t be welcome back anymore. The complete loneliness that you feel; the disconnect you feel from your family. Another time, in the same year, I did something terrible again, and my own mother told me that she would beat me until I couldn’t move with a cane if it weren’t for the fact that I wasn’t worth going to jail over. At that moment, I had nowhere to feel safe. My home was a place where I wasn’t wanted and I feared possibly for my life; school was a place where I was ridiculed for being too emotional and “feminine” for any of the guys there. I felt so afraid that I felt like ending my life would cause relief. Later, I’ll tell you quite possibly my only reason for still being on earth.
Finally, my biggest fear of all, failure. Growing up, I acquired the twisted notion that failing ment being a disappointment in everyone’s eyes. When I was in 4th grade, I started failing school. I know 4th grade sounds early, but I’ll tell you why: rejection. That year, I had no real friends to speak of. Everyone else did but me because since I went to that school in 3rd grade, I had solidified everyone’s image of me being an unstable kid. Everyone avoided me and wanted nothing to do with me. This made me heavily sad and unmotivated to do anything school related. Sound familiar? Because, it sounds like looking back, I had mild depression in 4th grade, when I was 9 or 10. Also that year, I was heavily in love with a girl, who I actually confessed my love to; this ended about as well as you’d expect. She said no and avoided me entirely after that. This caused me to both harden my heart to feelings (specifically love), which I am still trying to get over to this very day, and caused me to not want to do school. My grades slipped to C’s and D’s; in 4th grade! The first quarter, my parents were furious and punished me, so when it was the same for the second quarter, I hid my report card. When my parents inevitably found it, then punished me even more severely. I had found it severely hard to learn, and what my parents knew that I didn’t was that I had autism. Frankly, this put unneeded pressure on me; I was a kid with a learning disability who was expected to perform on par with, if not better than the regular kids. Needless to say, I felt screwed. I was afraid that the more I failed, the more I would get punished.
That was and still is a problem: my fear of failing. In science, people are not likely to succeed their first try; in fact, they are expected to fail. After all, how do you know what does work if you don’t know what doesn’t work? Countless children think that it’s not alright to fail because they are expected to succeed, and if they don’t succeed then they are going to be cast aside by society for the wolves to eat. That sounds like a dystopia that would be conceived by George Orwell. Why are children subjected to this? The simple answer is that no matter how much older generations say that they had it harder than us, no matter how easy they say we have it, no matter how many wars they’ve witnessed, we are going to have to bear more stress upon our shoulders than those of the past since perhaps the Great Depression. We will have to deal with global warming, growing unstable governments, the economy worsening, and even more strife. They know that our future looks grim, so they’re trying to prepare us in the literal worst ways possible: by telling us that failure is not an option if you want to survive.
I said before that there were only a few select reasons that I’m still on Earth today. Let’s explore those right now. If you recall my 7th grade story, I felt like I wasn’t welcome anywhere, so why am I here? The simple question is women. There is no man besides my stepfather and one of my best friends who has ever consoled me in my entire life and convinced me that life was still worth living, fears and all. I grew up without a father, and the only male idol was my grandfather, the one that dangled me over bridges. Other than that, I was raised by my mother, the one that threatened to beat me with a cane; my sister, who had slight disdain for me for a lot of my childhood; and my grandma, who is the sweetest person in my entire family. I don’t think I have to say that when growing up, gender equality was to a maximum, which is what I still believe should be in everyone’s minds today. Later on, my sister became the only one in my family who I could really talk to on a personal level. The only others who I could do that with were my more emotional friends at school, who were all girls. Now’s not the time to go over the standards that guys are meant to live up to as “men”, but know that I was an outcast of them, except for one really awesome friend that I won’t have the time to talk about. Now, where most guys were becoming extremely attracted to girls, I still hardened my heart to not feel love, so I often talked among small groups of them, and still find them easier to talk to then guys. I had a few nice ones that got me through tough times, but then last year, in my 10th grade, something happened with my perception of one of them.
At the end of last year, and during this year, I’ve had to get over a very, very important fear: my fear of loving and not being rejected. I have recently found myself in love again, and it feels much different from when you are in 4th grade. When the poet wrote “Distance makes the heart grow fonder.”, not everyone had the best idea of what he ment, but now I think I do. Time away should only reinforce how much you need that person. I met this person in my freshmen year when she was new to my school, and she’s been one of my best friends since. But then, why would I risk ruining a perfectly great friendship in order to admit love? I’ve lied in my bed, afraid that she won’t understand why I love her. I thought this, afraid of the consequences of this action, but then I remembered a quote from my favorite book, The Alchemist. “One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving”. This reminded me that just like my fear of loving, loving is irrational. Love has no reason to hide fear; this is why I am still waiting until I can see her in person to confess my love.
In the end, can we say that I’ve overcome any of my fears? The real answer is no. Not yet at least. I’m only taking the first step, which is being open about them. Fear has ruled most of my life, and it’s been a miserable life behind the facade that I put up for others. A life of fear has made me at best depressed and at worst, suicidal. You can’t keep one jump ahead of your fears, but you’re the only one who can stop it from holding yourself back.
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