Day 11 - Fears

It would be easy to be superficial with this entry, to simply say that I am most afraid of snakes. Those animals have always, probably will always, terrify me. No animal without legs should be able to move that quickly, cover that much ground, be so damn small yet still deadly. Or big and deadly! They can bite you, strangle you, and probably other things that I don't know about. Whether or not they are poisonous, snakes scare the shit out of me. In addition to that I also have some fears about drowning, which seems like a fairly dreadful way to die, though perhaps not as bad as being buried alive. Though i have not nearly had to confront those as much as I have had to confront snakes, so they have slithered their way to the top of my list. But I think I would prefer to get less physical with this entry, I think for an entry titled "Fears" I ought to discuss a few of my many not so tangible troubles.

Chief among these worries would be the concerns I have about the future. Actually, I will probably just dedicate the rest of this entry to subsets of that fear. I spend a lot of time thinking about time. I put things in perspective and, even though I'm only twenty one, I always come to the realization that what I think is a long time never really is all that long. What does not scare me about the passing of time is the fear of death. I guess that is a concern, the mystery of it all, but I don't spend much time worrying about that because I think the more concerning part about this fear is that I will continue to go through life and feel as if I have simply squandered all my time. That I will always be building toward something, but never accomplish anything. I worry about finding a job, possibly about when I will work in general. And where, too. Once school is finished, completely, if I will have the chance to enunciate what I know. Who will I be surrounded by. Will all the people I know disappear? how real is college? That uncertainty, that is what scares me.

And I'm afraid, I think, of failure. I'm afraid that it is unavoidable. Not that I can't cope with it, not that it will happen, but that it will always happen. That I am the reason why it happens. That in order to stop these fears I need to change, I'm afraid that I can't change. I'm afraid that if I do change then I am admitting to failure, that I am in some ways shunning myself. And these fears, they do more than make me scared, they make me angry, they make me frustrated. At myself, at the world, the way society functions, the way I am trapped, the way that I can change everything if I tried harder, or tried differently. And there's the fear, I suppose, at least partially, of being alone. But I don't know if I feel all that afraid of that, that just adds to the fear of myself. The constantly repeated line is "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and I'm not so sure that I agree with that. Perhaps all we have to fear is fear of self. And maybe the world just knows how to cope with it better than I do, but I'm afraid. I'm damn afraid.

Thanks for reading.

Tomorrow's Topic: Favorite TV Shows

Rich