Have you ever experienced your heart racing while watching a horror movie or when something startles us? Even the bravest people have experienced fear.

Friends, let me explain what actually is the fear of living. The first kind of fear or in other words, the greatest ever fear present in a human being is the terror of what other people will think about them.

We are not scared of the dark, but we are afraid of what lies in it. We are not afraid of heights, we are afraid of falling. We are not afraid of love, but we are scared of not receiving the love back. We are not scared of letting go of things, we are just afraid of accepting that it has gone.

Theodore Rosevelt said and I quote here: “Life is a great adventure and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.”

So here, I will not be wrong if I say that fear is a devil, which is within ourselves and ultimately effects the way we act. A very common situation, which each one of us goes through, is standing there behind the podium, facing people and giving words to our thoughts. The only thing that is going on in our minds at that time is, ‘When will this end?’

Ask yourself, are you scared of people or do you fear that the audience will make fun of you if you make a mistake? For instance, if you make an unusual statement or maybe an incorrect pronunciation, the audience will get a chance to laugh at you and your friends will make fun of you for life.

These apprehensions stop you from trying and make you think twice before doing something new.

According to Les Brown, “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”

Actually, fear has many faces, like fear of rejection, loneliness, failure, change, being judged and last, but not the least, the fear of inadequacy. Many people worry that they are just not good enough and this misconception prevents them from reaching out to good opportunities in life. Thus, in order to compensate for their fears, they try to become perfect but remain plagued by their thoughts, which lead them to have inferiority complex.

So I have come to a conclusion that we have actually become slaves to our fears, we are confined only by the walls we have built for ourselves. If we have to live in this world, we have to fight with our fears. This is our world, we have to shape it, otherwise someone else will take our place.

Published in Dawn, Young World, January 13th, 2018