Today is the final post of the series of guest posts on fear. Today’s blogger is Belinda, someone I have known through the blogoworld for sometime now. I really enjoy her wonderful posts and her insights into life and I am happy to provide a peek into her thoughts through this post. Thank you Belinda for bringing out the silver lining around fear via this post.
||Guest Post||
Contributor: Belinda O.
I encourage my cats’ fear of strangers, at least, I don’t discourage it. If a stranger comes to the door, particularly someone carrying tools and wires or other unknown entities, the cats hightail it down the stairs and under the bed. There they’ll stay until they’re certain it’s safe, and if they fall asleep (which they often do), even longer than that.
Fear helps keep my cats safe. If I’m not home, I want them hiding if a stranger enters. In the same way, I follow my fears to a metaphorical space-under-the-bed at times as well. Call me overly-cautious, but I believe in better safe than sorry.
That’s fine when the fears involve dark alleys, like the one that leads to the dumpster behind my work place. I’m supposed to take the garbage out every night before I leave, but I don’t do it after dark. It’s deserted and a set-up for danger. If my boss forced the issue and told me to “take the damn garbage out anyway,” I’d quit. Fortunately, she has a healthy respect of – fear of – dark alleys herself.
As a child I had unnamed fears as a result of abuse in a time before my memory really began. I say unnamed, I refer to it as a time without memory, but the fears actually were very specific, I just didn’t know how to verbalize it. As time went on the memory became duller and the fears broader.
I held myself back from so much that could cause ridicule or shame, and in doing so, I also held myself back from doing things that could have enhanced my life and increased my self-esteem. I didn’t see it that way, however, preferring to stay safe.
As an adult, I fully faced the pain, but lifetime habits are hard to break. The fear remained.
It took an incident that was surreal on the one hand and starkly real on the other to break down some of what continued to hold me back, fears that were so intrinsically a part of me I didn’t recognize them. I still am challenged with some of it. I don’t know if it will ever end, and I pray I never face what I faced before to stop it completely.
That fear is bigger now than the one I faced since I was learning to walk. Still, I refuse to be felled by either.
Life is bigger than our fears, it is bigger than our failures. It is made up of so much more than what we believe in when we’re younger, and there is always more to discover.
Life is bigger than our fears.
About Belinda:
Belinda works with social media & public relations for small businesses and non-profit organizations, with a growing focus on diversity and minority perspective. Prior to this she worked with individuals with developmental disabilities.
Belinda believes in the power of words, written, spoken and unspoken. She believes what we write and what we create unleashes who we are, even to our own surprise.
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Disclaimer: The thoughts and opinions expressed in the guest post are solely the guest’s. The owner of this blog makes no representation as to the originality, accuracy or completeness of any information in this post.
“Heads, I win; tails, you lose!” Fear used to say, every single time. Life for me was a long, dark stretch of fear-filled path for years. Some of these fears, like the fear of ghosts and monsters, were born and nurtured in my mind’s dark recesses, fathered by an overwrought imagination; some were born out of external events, caused by external agents – miscreants, child abusers, bullies in school – that tried to rob me of all that was good in me and left dark impressions on my mind. These fears started to rule my waking thoughts, my hours of sleep, my every move, my very life, in fact; my dreams turned into nightmares, I lost my sleep, my peace of mind, my confidence; I even lost my ability to help others for a time – no wonder that; how could I think of helping others if I couldn’t help myself? My life became a veritable hell, filled with depression and fear, and I started to feel as if I was constantly descending into a bottomless abyss. I started to be afraid of going to school and facing bullies, of going out and facing people, afraid of predators prowling in human form, but I was equally afraid of staying at home, alone: the walls seemed to come rushing at me, smacking their gaping jaws, wanting to swallow me whole. My fears wouldn’t let me be, not even for a moment; they would chase me to the edge of my sanity and persistently try to push me over.
I feel privileged to talk about fear that I have known since childhood, more anything else. It’s like a mole or scar on the face, which always exists and which will create unnecessary insecurity if given importance.
A close friend of mine is truly worried for me these days. His concerns are not unfounded though. He’s read my story The Dress Code which is part of the anthology Mock, Stalk and Quarrel, just now published by Readomania, after a competition was held on satirical short stories under the title Mocktales.
Even George Orwell, who wrote my all-time favourite satire Animal Farm, found it really tough to get his book published despite being an established journalist and author at that time. Since Orwell’s premise for the book was The Russian Revolution and through the allegory of the animal farm he proved that power corrupts and rights are violated, many publishers did not want to pick up the manuscript. Even Orwell’s own publisher refused it after sitting on it for ages.
Mock, Stalk & Quarrel is a collection of 29 satirical stories, penned by prolific writers and bestselling authors, that attempt to mock, question, defy, and raise a voice against issues that matter. The stories were chosen from a nationwide contest conducted by Readomania and compiled in this collection that promises to be an engaging and thought-provoking read. For more about the book and the authors, head to the 
arpitaapramanick.wordpress.com 