Fears

Too scared to look...too scared not too.

Whether you are five or fifty, everyone has something they are afraid of.  Sometimes they are completely justified, and other times they are totally irrational.  And sometimes they are just downright funny (I know a guy that at first looks is one of the toughest guys you'll ever see, and then you find out he's afraid of butterflies...as in freaks out and screams like a girl scared).

The thing about fears is how you act upon them, and whether you let them control your life or if you use those fears to drive you.  I have three fears that I can honestly say affect me daily.  The first is a fear of my mother, and not in that I'm afraid of what she'll do to me daily.  It's an underlying fear that at some point, I may do something that will make her lose all faith in me.  It's more of a fear of making her disappointed in me.  I've had that fear for a long time, and it has allowed me to separate myself from certain decisions and re-evaluate them before locking in what I'm going to do.  Sometimes, I've made the wrong decision and I have disappointed her.  Luckily, nothing I have done has permanently hampered me in her eye.  But even so, those times when I have disappointed her, I've done everything in my power to rectify the situation and improve myself so that it never happens again.

If I fully lived in the fear that I'd never be remembered, this is what I'd be doing right now.

The second is a fear of being forgotten.  It stems from my dream of one day creating something, whether it's a game, or a TV show, or a movie, or something where everyone for a long time enjoys it.  Whether I get rich off of it is besides the point, but I want to have something that years down the line, long after I'm gone, people will still be able to look back on it and will remember my name along with it.  The fear comes from never reaching that.  Becoming just another statistical death amongst the masses where aside from those that physically knew me, no one will ever know who I am.  I would like to believe that this blog might eventually reach that status, and I hope I'm alive when it reaches there.  Until then, I continue to attempt to create something that will be remembered and cherished.

I am never going to live in Australia...EVER.

The third is my irrational fear.  Spiders.  Eight-legged, ugly little insect eating spiders.  Even from the smallest little house spider to the big tarantulas to those Australian spiders and Camel spiders.  I take precautions within my house to ensure that no spiders enter at least my room.  I have plug-ins that generate sound through the walls to create a barrier and I spray the baseboards and windows and doors every month or so.  Occasionally, one finds a gap and breaks through.  When that happens, I'm so afraid of them that I have to use oversized hard cover books or spray them from a distance to kill them.  If I see one and don't manage to kill it, I'm paranoid for hours, sometimes days, of what it's doing in the places I can't see.  Is it plotting to crawl all over me in my sleep?  Is it going to set up a nice little home and watch me with it's eight eyes as I dream?  *shudders* I'm going to stop there....I'm creeping myself out.

I'm just glad my father has never heard of Slenderman

I look at my father though, and the only fear I've seen him have is ghosts and stuff.  He doesn't like hearing horror stories or watching scary movies, he doesn't like people talking about ghosts or possessions or exorcisms around him, and he definitely doesn't like to know that my great grandmother sometimes comes to visit us, even though she's been dead for more than ten years now.  So we just don't expose him to it.  

My mother's worst nightmare.

My mother on the other hand, she's afraid of some funny stuff.  Midgets, clowns, driving over bridges, handling raw chicken...we tease her about it all the time.

The point I'm trying to make is how we handle fears for our day to day life.  Some people use fear to motivate them to be better, while others let fears consume them into a hardcore preventative state.  Look at those afraid of germs.  Some just make sure they wash their hands well and often, carry around some anti-germ lotions, and generally take care to monitor what they are touching and eating from.  Others on the other hand will lock themselves into a hermetically sealed home, only leaving if they absolutely need to.  They wash constantly, and even small little specks of dust or dirt will drive them absolutely crazy.  

This guy just overcame his fear of being a silhouette.

The first step to living with your fear is admitting you have it.  The second is confronting it.  My first two fears live with me constantly, and I work hard to try to keep them at bay without letting them interfere with my life.  The third one I've been attempting to get better at.  I'm no longer afraid of paper spiders, and smaller spiders I can at least approach for the kill with a paper towel or toilet paper.  Eventually I would like to get over the fear enough that I can be in the same house as someone with a pet tarantula without constantly looking over my shoulder to see if it has escaped. (I did go to a guy's house once that had a pet tarantula that he didn't tell me about.  As soon as I saw it, I left despite his assurance that it can't escape.)  I'll never hold a spider, that I'm sure of.  But it would be nice to not be paranoid about every spider I see.

So what are your fears?  How do you prevent them from taking over your life?  Or do they, and what do you do to keep your self from going into a panic over them?