Thy Fear, Thy Art

This is not a story of fiction, but a personal essay that chronicles my fears and my search into what "fear" really is.

What is it to fear something? What is it to be truly afraid for your life? The concept of fear is a vast subject that contains a multitude of components and situations.  Fear can be a powerful foe and an even more powerful ally if a person knew how to wield it correctly. There have been great men, truly awful and horrible men to any moral standards, but nonetheless great men that have successfully used fear to control nations. Such a power is what I wish to harvest. I don’t plan on taking over any countries and I don’t plan on using fear to cause any great harm to humankind, but I seek to use it in my creations of fiction and video games. I enjoy scaring people, most people that know me know this, but at times I feel that my morbidity is actually a façade and really conveys the truth about the creative side of me instead of the side of me I present to the world. However there are times where the two are so intermixed with each other that they are in fact the same. Regardless I feel the subject of my morbidity should be re-examined, but this is neither here nor there. I’ve always thought that learning the underpinnings of fear and what fear really is on the multiple levels is crucial to anybody who wants to partake in a career within the horror realm. With this article of writing I want to examine what fear is and some of the layers of it and more importantly what fear is to me and the reasons behind certain fears. I feel that this is a vast subject that will require a lot of research besides my own  inner soul searching moments that I’m about to present to you; which is why this article is dubbed “Part 1” because it will be the first of many.

I can be one to admit that I am a very fearful man that is plagued with fears and can at times be jumpy or nervous in certain situations during the day. For example, if I’m walking down the streets of Chicago plugged into my iPod listening to some bizarre array of music that stretches through all genres I will jump if some driver lays down on his horn for no apparent reason. Now that I think of it, that is not so much fear as it is being startled. The act of being startled I would, however, relate to fear, though to me startling is a cheap and easy copout to frightening someone. This is the reason why I’ve lately been so disappointed in most, if not all, horror films that I’ve watched within the last couple of years. They spend time creating an eerie atmosphere and hardly use it, instead they will use silly gimmicks such as “throwing the cat at the frame” where something will suddenly pop into frame during a tranquil period and be accompanied with a loud sound. The popping of the eerie creature may be slightly frightening, but it looses most of its effect without the overlay of the sound. Moments like these make me sick and feel as if the writer and director were using techniques only to quickly startle the audience. Of course it will startle most people because loud noises usually do.

What is fear? The feelings as most are aware—because I think it’s almost impossible for any living person to have lived so much of their lives and not have experienced the sense of fear—can vary to several different degrees. Fear can limit you. Lock you up and paralyze you on the spot. Or it can pump a large amount of adrenalin into you and make you an active, frenzied, person fleeing for their lives. Now fleeing for your life is an extreme example of a type of fear because not everyone has had moments where they stood face to face with Death and came out the victor. But I can’t speak for everyone, maybe everyone has, I’m not the one to tell you.  Most people experience fear on day to day basis whether it is being in public, standing up to giving a speech or as simple as meeting a blind date for the first time. There are phobias which are fears that people have that are so extreme it would make them act out of the normal and be serious altered if such an object were in the same room as the person. These are interesting topics and will get more attention either later in this paper or the next, but I’ve been pussyfooting around it and now I think I shall relate several experiences of my fears and what they mean to me.

Once again I lay myself on the cold steel table before you naked and vulnerable. I’ll be honest that I’m a little fearful when I write this paper. Fears lead to inner truths and inner weaknesses, but in order to understand the different aspects of fear I think it is necessary that you journey to the core because what does it matter if you only scratch the surface?  I will not travel to as far as my childhood when accounting my fears and some of my experiences, those memories are altered with time and perception and I feel the most recent ones have more relevance to what I’m trying to learn.

Where to start when there are so many to choose from? I guess I’ll start with one of the basics. I’m arachnophobia. For those of you who unfamiliar with this term it is the fear of spiders. One thing I’d like to note real quick here, and I know I mentioned this before, but certain fears are surface fears that can be broken down to reveal many sub and may core fears; this will also be addressed more later. In most cases we acquire fear from past traumatic experiences, this is probably one of the easiest ways to become fearful of something. For me my fear of spiders happened when I was younger around eight or seven, I know I said I wasn’t going to go that far back, but I will allow it for this one instance because I remember the even pretty vividly and is one of the core reasons why I fear spiders so much.

When I was living in St. Louis I had a friend named Jason, he was my best friend until he moved away several years later. I often went to his house right across the street to play or get into some mischief that we were up to. The day it happened we went to his house to play some video game on the now old NES system. Before we started playing video games he showed me his pet tarantula, it creeped me out, but I wasn’t afraid then. After the brief exhibit of his exotic pet we commenced our mission to defeat some evil bad guys. Hours went by and it was time for me to go home. We went upstairs and Jason’s mother told us that his tarantula had escaped its cage and she couldn’t find it. I didn’t want to help in the search so I walked towards the front door. To my luck I found the hairy thing. It was on the ceiling above the means of my escape, the front door. Jason and his mother came and they looked up at it and debated how they were going to get it down. Now I was starting to become afraid. I was afraid that if I went under it that the creature would fall from the ceiling and land on some part of me, the legs pricking at my head, it gave me the goose bumps. Jason’s mom told me to make a quick dash and that I would be fine. I made the dash, but I wasn’t fine. People find this next part hard to believe, but it did drop and it did land on my head and I did scream.

Shivers just went up and down my spine as I wrote that. Upon further analyzing my fear I can break this fear of spiders into several categories. I fear the way that they move and that they use eight legs to move as they do. Eight legs is abnormal and it chills my spine. Also the fact that they can descend from above makes me fearful because of past experiences and sometimes you won’t see it coming. I can be honest once again and say this is a fear that I could easily get over if I took the time and energy to, but at this moment in my life it isn’t my highest priority and while I may jump on a chair and hold my skirt up when I see a spider or cower away from a tunnel of them, it’s nothing I’m going to lose my life over.

Spiders are an example of a physical being/object I fear. I don’t know if I have that many psychical fears, but I know that I have a great deal of psychological fears. These fears, unlike the spiders, do limit my capabilities of getting certain things accomplished and holds me back from experiencing different aspects of life. I’m afraid to get up in front of a group of people. I’m afraid of success. And I’m of taking risks from time to time and being out of my element. When I talk about fears I’ve had some people ask me if I feared women.  Their allegations aren’t without merit, but I can say they are false and the real fear is something on a greater depth and not a singular fear. They assume this because I have for a fact been single for my entire life. I’ve been on one date that I don’t really consider a date and nothing ever came of it, one night was all it was at some high school dance. Yes this is also means that I’ve never been kissed let alone slept with a woman. Right now getting laid isn’t on the highest of my priorities when my right hand and the images on my monitor are satisfying enough; for the time being at least. Too much information, I know, but it was needed to know why they thought such allegations.  It was also needed because it helps explain some of my fears. No I don’t fear sex. I might be worried about not being able to satisfy my lover, but that is such a minuscule part and nothing I even fear.

What makes me afraid comes in two parts when concerning women: Rejection and vulnerability. Most times the fear of rejection would hinder me from approaching an attractive member of the opposite sex and asking them on a date or engaging in some simple conversation; although this was more prominent in my teens that it is now and for the most part I’ve gotten over my fear of rejection to some degree. Being rejected isn’t the end of the world. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that and I know that is a fact, you will move on, you will meet other people, but doesn’t mean it can’t be devastating and crush you as it had many times during my high school years. After I’ve hyped myself to ask this girl I really liked out and get rejected, in front of everyone mind you, I crumble. I close up and don’t talk to anybody. I slipped into a depression and any small thing could ruin my day for the next couple of days. I don’t know fully why it had that much impact on me, but it did and I was nothing but a wilted flower afterwards.

 I’m afraid of being vulnerable the most. Honestly that is quit possibly the biggest fear I have. The idea of opening yourself to another person and showing them everything that makes you “you” is a very scary thought. This sense of vulnerability is what makes me fear writing certain aspects of this article because I’m very well exposed to you the reader as I mentioned before, lying naked on a cold steel table. When I’m vulnerable I can be very weak and at that point I give the person I’m with a certain amount of power which also scares me. I’d like to believe that I would quickly bounce back if the person chose to wield that hammer of vulnerability to harm me and I probably would, but not fully knowing the person intentions, it’s a scary thought. It’s a state of being that I despise being in and is one of the reason why I haven’t been so gung-ho about getting into a relationship. I’m going to contradict myself here because I also feel a great need for the experience of a relationship. I’ve had friends tell me, no you don’t because when it ends it hurts. Well, I’m well aware of what it feels like to be crushed when you’re vulnerable in certain cases, moments that I don’t feel like sharing at this time and may do so in a later article. However it is an experience in life that I do want to traverse with someone because being alone is not all that cracked up as it’s meant to be. Sometimes having someone there for you is a comforting thought and it could very well be worth facing and overcoming your fears, well my fears in this case, and experiencing something in life that you haven’t yet done.

I got on a little bit of a tangent there, but oh well. Also I feel I must conclude this paper here. I’ve felt vulnerable writing this long enough. Now you know another side of me that I don’t often share even though it was in the context of exploring my fears. I’m aware that I’ve barely scratched the surface with this paper and understanding fear and what it means to me. We can say though that there are layers to certain fears and different types of fear a human can experience in their lifetime and more often than not it’s a larger fear that is composed of smaller fears that stack upon each other. I can promise you that I will continue my research and I will continue to make my observations of fear. This is far from the last.