what are we so afraid of.....

To face our biggest fears in life, we must first identify them. Some are easy, whether it be a fear of heights, failure, snakes, rejection, the dentist, creepy crawlies or other things that go bump in the night . Those fears are easily identified and to a large degree easy to face, and whether we know it or not, those are not our biggest fears. When I pondered this question I noticed a tremendous paradox; in order to face/identify our biggest fear we must explore the deepest recesses of our subconscious, which in of itself might be everyone’s biggest fear, so first we must overcome our biggest fear to find out our biggest fear?!?! I think I just blew my own mind. I got lost in this paradox, this riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The more I thought about it the more it seemed as if there was a fortress built around these most inner/personal thoughts. We are afraid of what we might find there, the things we don’t talk about at parties, and would never mention to another human being…..our own inner Dexter if you will. I worked relentlessly to penetrate the fortress built around that part of my subconscious and in so doing I couldn’t help but wonder if that fortress in a way is an engineering marvel of evolution designed to save us from ourselves…...from literally driving ourselves crazy.

I struggle(d) mightily with this, to the point it consumed me much like a fire engulfs a dry piece of wood. Could I penetrate that fortress? Did I truly want to, or was I afraid of what I might find there? As the seconds turned in to minutes, the minutes into hours, and the hours into days I couldn't’t let go of the question or the paradox. Every interaction I had with someone the thought entered my mind, and also made me wonder if they ever thought about these things, and what their true biggest fear was. Some part of me wanted to grab each person I came across and shake them like a British nanny, asking them why they didn’t seem to be struggling with this issue? How could they just go through the day and never wonder or ponder these things? I decided I had to let it go or it wouldn’t be long before I was hauled off in a straight jacket and dumped in a padded room. The second I did, wouldn’t you know the answer came to me in a dream.

I dreamt that I was dead but it wasn’t a fear of dying that is my biggest fear it was that no one was at the funeral…..it was that I was “forgettable”; I realized that was my biggest fear…..to be forgotten, to be forgettable. Now in close to 33 years on this planet I have been called a lot of things by a lot of people, but never once has it been forgettable. I can’t help but wonder that if that is because deep in my subconscious that has always been my biggest fear, so it has shaped my approach to life, my personality, who I am. Could it be that our biggest fear (even without us knowing it) determines who we are, what we do? Another question for another time.