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.
Keeping in mind the theme of my my next book, How I tamed the dragon named fear, I am planning to include voice of the reader as a part of the book. For those of you who don’t know about my upcoming book yet, How I tamed the dragon named fear is a short self-help book on fear.
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.
Scribbles@Arpita 