FEAR

As human beings, the first emotion that we probably feel is fear. We are afraid the moment we are born. We enter this world crying and afraid because we have entered the uncertainty of the real world after spending months in the comfort and security of our mother’s womb. Slowly, we lose our initial fear of the world and develop other emotions. 

Fear is shape-shifting and constant.  Throughout our lives, we feel fear towards completely different things. At the same time, mortal fears stay with us throughout our lives. Right now, I want to speak about shape-shifting fears because we cannot do anything about mortal fears, they are just there, making sure we know what the consequence of jumping off a cliff is.

On the other hand, the shape-shifters’ only purpose is to hinder our lives and make us doubt ourselves and every move we make, we can call them emotional fears too. Emotional fears tend to hit us later in life. In childhood, we rarely have these emotional fears. But as puberty hits, the fear-meter starts running.

Being a typical teenager, these fears haunt me too. For a long time, my worst fear was insecurity. I think it was the same case for a lot of teenagers. Different people are insecure about different things. To me, my biggest insecurity was my height. Well, I am on the shorter end of the male populace and well, it always bothered me. I remember downloading some app that claimed that you could grow and all you needed to do was the exercises listed in the app. I did the exercises daily for about two months and well, not a single inch was gained. 

Somehow I got a hold of myself, realized that I’ll probably never grow, and tried to accept myself. While I’m not completely over it yet. I have made a lot of progress in accepting myself as a short king and I’m proud of myself for that. To anyone that is struggling with any insecurity, I know it is not easy to lose years of self-learned doubt, it will take a lot of time. I want to tell all of you to do one thing though: look around. Your friends and family are glad to have you around. You matter to someone. If we were really as worthless as our insecurities told us we were, we would not have the love and admiration of all these people. Remember to love yourself or if you think that’s impossible, try and do things that at least make you respect yourself. Once you start respecting yourself, the loving yourself part usually comes automatically. Again, it is not easy, even I, the man preaching so much to you sometimes struggle to love myself.

When I was able to kind of move past my insecurities, I thought I was done with fear. Then I discovered the shape-shifter creeps into your head without warning and so stealthily that you never see it coming and before I knew it, I was under the clutches of my worst fear, I am afraid that I’ll never amount to anything worthwhile in this life. If you read my first blog, you’d remember that I tend to be extremely lazy and the lockdown, because of COVID-19, only made the laziness worse because when there was regular school, I was at least forced to do productive things but during COVID, I did absolutely nothing throughout the day. My day was eat, watch Netflix, sleep and repeat. For two whole years, I made zero progress in these two years, actually, I think I made negative progress during this time. So as a product of becoming a worse being in those two years. I internalized the fear that I won’t make any progress, ever. Since college reopened, it has gotten better. I spend fewer sleepless nights worrying about how I won’t amount to anything. But, it’s not like I have become a productivity machine. On most days, I’m still just as lazy. There’s been progress but I have a long way to go. It doesn’t help that I’m now also confused about what I wish to do in life. Figuring out life is harder than I thought it would be. The other day I was endlessly scrolling through Instagram and since I have set an app use timer of around an hour and a half it showed me a warning for usage, it was 2 in the morning and I sat there thinking, what the actual fuck am I doing with my life? And the fear struck me again. I wonder whether my fear will ever completely disappear. It has a long time left to haunt me is all I know.

I’ll try my best to figure out how to get rid of my demons. I don't know how I'll do that but then, would life be fun if it was easy? I do know one thing though, that fear is actually more important than we give it credit for, without fear most of us would do some pretty stupid stuff. In a way, fear is a tool that protects humans from human stupidity. Without fear, we would never make proper decisions. Without fear, human beings cannot experience growth.

So be a little scared, it's pretty good for you. 

More importantly, get over that fear. 

For now, that's all I want to say. See you all again next week. 

Bojack Horseman, Netflix.

Love,

Pranav.