Fear

Fear is a mind killer—Henry Ford

What are you so afraid of? What scares you more than a dark alley on a tranquil night, where black cats and mice roam? What scares you more than death staring you in the face? Life, that’s what!

Life scares you because you have to be strong every day that you live. You have to constantly figure out new ways to maneuver this place called earth, this thing called life.

We fear our own existence because people expect things of us; we expect things of ourselves that we aren’t sure we can truly accomplish.

So what are the consequences of this fear? We fight back at life!

We fight the people who love us, by telling them that they will never love us enough. We fight against those that don’t love us, by proving to them that we never needed them in the first place. We fight the nay-sayers, the haters, and the oppressors, showing them that schadenfreude is only an ungranted wish.

And then we fight our worst adversary: Our conscience.

That’s the fight that is the most intense, most heart-wrenching, and most painful. We fight our minds for telling us when to give up, when to start; for telling us that we can do something when physical willpower says “no”.

We fight ourselves when goals are not quite accomplished the way we expect them to be. We fight ourselves when we look into the mirror and realize that the innocence of childhood has been replaced.

We then wage a war between self and inner-self, the deadliest of battles known to man.

And when we’ve managed to annihilate our own selves, we get up, pinch ourselves, and then realize that we are still alive and that the battle of life is just a vicious cycle that we must be courageous enough to face, as long as heartbeats race and blood flows, because the only victory sweeter than beating our enemies, is that of self-realization.