Notes on My Relationship with Fear 

Get rid of your fears! Get rid of your fears!

Maybe because of the spiritual awakening. Maybe because it’s a social trend or because of the self-help/personal development industry growing so rapidly. Maybe because I’ve met a boy with the saddest eyes I’ve seen in a while. Maybe because we’ve started searching for ways and ways to get rid of our daily anxiety.

Actually, I don’t know exactly why, but this Get rid of your fears! mantra was somehow present in my life in the last months. So present that I – someone who believed that is not frustrated by this aspect – realised that I truly do have fears. I am not consumed by them but sometimes they do mix up my daily balance and harmony. 

So I started thinking:

How do these fears come to be and what makes them grow so much that they (most of the time) get the best of us, of our daily life, of our joys and wonderful moments. 

How can a certain fear affect us so much and on so many levels?

Specialists say that fear is something we contract in the first days of our lives and it grows in us, multiplying on different fields and sentimental registers during our lives. 

Conspiracy theorists believe that fear is the most powerful means of mass manipulation. 

Religion….well…religion is something which, if you ask me, drives the most fears into an individual’s life. 

I DECREE

that fear is in us; a feeling that comes from our subconscious mind, we come with it in this world and it grows as we live, facing different experiences in our lives. If we are lucky we come into a family that knows how to minimize it. But more than 99 per cent of the people on this planet are not so lucky. Because fear is not considered something to be protected of, like a flu or a more concrete danger. And funny how we grow, year after year, turning ourselves into mature individuals poisoned by the most dangerous enemy whose presence we ve neglected all this time. 

To find a physical correspondent for fear…cancer would be it. It stays in you, and sadly, sometimes you detect it when it’s too little, too late. And you die. The most devious yet simple equation.

This is fear. Stays in you, you start to feel scared or have doubts or ask yourself  ‘what if’s until you start experiencing panic attacks, anxiety or depression. And suddenly you don’t have to courage to start your new business, you think about what others think about you, you think that if you’ve gained a little weight you’re not worthy anymore. And you stop! You just stop living! Or in the best case scenario, you pause! You take a break from living!

Sure, you’re a fighter and you’ll get back on your feet – or not – but who gives you back the time you’d lost? You may loose a day, a week, a month, a year or your whole life. Who gives that time back to you?

Well, I guess no one, right? Because no one took it away from you! You took it away from yourself! Or better yet, your fear took it away from you. 

La Mode Toujours fringe dress – Manuri sequin dress – Smiling Shoes – Tria Alfa jewelry 

Photos by Costrut 

My two cents are these: every time I fear something, it either happened but it was not that bad (see Law of Attraction) or I feared the circus but it was just a clown, to speak metaphorically. And although in the last two months my fear seemed to get the best of me, I read, spoke with people who are wiser than me, searched help and took some Xanax. 

And although I, like all of us, have a few more miles to go until I put my fear on its knees, I am now more conscious, more informed, more at peace with my own fears and I am ready to not lose another day to fear.

There may be more notes on this subject since I consider it to be one of the worst feelings inside us, but what I know now is that sometimes, fear is just a projection of our mind – not a fact itself.  And what may come…well…we’ll face it then. No need to start building fatalist scenarios. So let us go on in life braver and with our heads up high. After all, fear is an accessory that was never fashionable!