Why am I scared?

I have always been someone who hides. Not myself, no. I used to do that as a kid, but not since adolescence. I hide my thoughts, if I don’t know you; I hide my feelings, if I am not comfortable; I hide my fears, no matter what; I hide my past, because I cannot face it myself. There are a million times that I am unable to sleep, because of something unnamed, something lingering in the back of my head. It brings tears to my eyes, makes my head grow heavy and sends shivers down my spine, but I can never put a finger to it. I am going to be honest and blunt. I am quite certain that that is a little, if not a lot, messed up. But that doesn’t change the fact that that happens.

I say I hide, because I do. Sometimes, I hide behind lies, sometimes behind pretences, and sometimes I hide behind thin veils. I hide behind foods and injuries. I hide behind the ambiguities of my words, behind cleverly (or so I hope) created characters and themes and plots. I hide behind my own words, and make them seem like someone else’s. I hide, so I don’t have to face that which I hide from.

A couple of weeks ago, I was obsessed with the thinking of a particular heinous kind of people. I was trying to rationalize in my mind a certain fear, the biggest fear in my mind, and I was trying to work my way backwards, as the perpetrator, because thinking forward hadn’t helped me in any manner. Thinking forward, thinking normally, just made me more scared, it made me more and more vulnerable, more blind. Blind with fear, I mean. I was losing sleep, which is a very effective coping mechanism for me usually, until the moment that it avoids me at all costs and effects, and becomes exactly what it protects me against. I am not saying that nightmares would leave me be at times like this, they wouldn’t. Nightmares are, and have always been an avid part of my life, I have had nightmares about almost every fear I have ever harboured. But nightmares are easy to recover from. Lack of sleep, not so. There were times that I would avoid sleeping to avoid nightmares. I am sure we’ve all done that. (I hope.) But now, I am okay with nightmares as long as I can sleep, because in dreams (or nightmares), I am away from the realities of my past. And closer to my fears.

Anyway, that obsession led to another one, a more rooted one, to be honest. I realised that in order to rationalize my biggest fear, I need to rationalize fear itself. So one fine day, I sat down to do that. And I came up with nothing. Why? Because I was too scared to think about the things that scare me. I made a lot of realisations about fear, and I put them into a story and hid my being from there too. But this piece, I am penning, because I owe it to myself. I owe it to myself, and my fears, to my demons, that I acknowledge them. That I acknowledge the fact that I am scared. I am scared in broad day light, not just in the darkness. I am scared in company and in solitude. I am scared in tears, as I am scared in laughter. I am scared when I realise that horrors are not that far away. I am scared when I realise what I can live with. What I can overcome.

That should give me a sense of satisfaction, shouldn’t it? That I am stronger than what I thought I was? That I have faced my fears and thus conquered them? No. I realise now, that it doesn’t work that way. The fears you face, stay with you. Just because you have faced them once, doesn’t mean you aren’t scared anymore. The scars aren’t always those of victory, they are those of suffering, and whether they are visible or not, they are there. Not acknowledging them will take you nowhere. Ignoring them, ignoring your past will not help you move on- neither forward, nor backward. You will be stuck, in the same place where you were. Or probably will slip towards a chasm, that you will know nothing about, even when you are in it.

Then what the hell do you do? You acknowledge it: your past, your fear, your present, your hopes, your desires. No matter how silly, stupid, dark, or irrational they maybe, acknowledge them. Whether you can do something about them, whether you can deal with them or not doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does. But recognizing and accepting in the first step- towards healing, towards success. Towards a better place.

I accept that I am scared. Of what? I will still hide that. But it makes it better just to accept. Accepting makes it easier to breathe. Try it.