Being Sarah

This is a concept that I have been contemplating quite a bit recently.  What is it to be fearless?  I am probably the last person on the planet who will ever find out, because there has never been a time in my life when I wasn’t afraid of something… let alone a lot of things.

When I was a kid I should have been carefree, but I lost my father at a very young age.  This caused me to develop a crippling fear of loss and abandonment that has stayed with me all of my life.

From my fear of losing the ones I loved developed a fear of individual disease and death.  Some may call this mild hypochondria. When I was a kid I was constantly convinced that their was something wrong with me, like cancer, mad cow disease (even though I was a vegetarian by choice and never actually consumed any meat), heart failure, or that I was going to meet my untimely death as a bi-product of a horrific accident, like a plane falling out of the sky and crashing straight into my bedroom.  It is important to note that I wasn’t worried about dying on a plane, because I refused to get anywhere near one, let alone fly on one, until my 21st year.  They were just far too dangerous.  At a young age, the .0000000001% likelihood of dying in a plane crash (or whatever the statistics are) was far too much of a risk for me to even consider taking.

To add to the list of fears, you can focus on other big ticket items like fear of commitment, food poisoning (which plagues me more often than anyone could possibly imagine), failure, public humiliation, being sexually assaulted, and letting down my family, or you can focus on the small things like sharks, jellyfish, scorpions, spiders, cockroaches, bees, walking alone in the dark, and slimy carrots.  Yes, carrots.  I can’t be the only one who hates carrots and is freaked out by the ones that have lived in the fridge so long that they developed some kind of icky slime on the outside.

I am so consumed by fears that I wrote my Master’s thesis about fear.  According to my colleagues, it was groundbreaking work.  However, I just saw it as a way to explore my personal neuroses by spending two years drugging through research, and conducting my own research, on other people’s fears.

I waste much more time focusing on my neurotic, sometimes a little ridiculous, fears, but the point of this is to express just how much fear plagues my life on a regular basis… a lot.

That said, my goal is to put all of that behind me.  I don’t know what it is like to be fearless, but I would certainly like to find out.  The point of life is to live it to the fullest not be afraid of everything in life that could go wrong.  I think I am missing out on a lot of experiences, and sometimes many hours of sleep, over fearing the worst outcome in every situation.

I have spent enough of my life (give or take 25 years) exploring what it is to be afraid.  It is time to spend the rest of my life exploring what it is to be fearless.