Every good investigator knows that to catch their quarry they must understand it first. I make myself the investigator and my ever elusive prey is fear – to quash it would make me an invincible man, untouchable by reason. To not feel the most feared emotion, of fear, opens the doors that bravery breaks down. But to capture and imprison my fear, I must understand it. This nearly impossible task, to define the amorphous, unquantifiable notion of fear, is why I write.
To be fearful is to be weak. That’s what you understand if your mind has been hardened by a continuous barrage of expectations. To fear failure, to fear life, to fear goals, is to be weak. That’s what you learn when ambition assaults your existence. Fear is a balancing factor, a voice of reason in every action. While seemingly a virtue, the distasteful truth? Reason fosters regret, prevents a fulfilling life of conquest and adventure. To reason is to be weak. Quite plainly put, I detest this weakness and thus is my grievance against fear; yet the rationale of my hate only provides a basis in this quest to identify my foe. How does one explicate it?
Most feel it as a discomfort that elbows its way forward into the pit of their abdomen, looming as a reminder of what there is to lose, what there is to go wrong. When you know fear as I have, though, it’s a sharp pain that yanks at your heart, shuts down any insurrectional thought that might incur the slightest consequence. When you know fear as I have, you begin to fear your fears, leading to a cyclone; one of fright, one that never runs out of fuel, one that obliterates everything down the timeline of your life. I imagine when I meet fear as a solidified humanoid foe, when I wrestle with it in the depths of my own mind, it will be the single darkest creature I have ever known. Not in a sense of colour, but in an emotional repulsiveness, something that defies everything good, that serves as a foil for whatever good is. I suppose this is how I define my fear.
But my fear’s form still seems vague. As though my brain is an old computer, this apparition I envision glitches and shifts, not forming a definite shape. With each experience that is added onto the short list of such that I possess, it changes again – each time adding another feature. Watching a horror movie, incomplete, dark eyes rose from a sunken face. Fleeing the terror of a dark basement, hazy legs faded into place. My screams in a haunted house created shifting lips. My ink colouring this page creates gossamer hands without form. But definite ears, ears with twisted folds which sprout gnarled hairs, blasted themselves into place with the bang that ended a life. And that is all I see. The rest of it remains a mystery. Perhaps that is tolerable. While I have set out to understand fear in its entirety, part of me does not wish to solve this mystery, lest I must experience to know how the rest of this gruesome figure looks.
Now I know that fear is shaped by what spawns it and the answer of what fear is lies therein. It’s simply our response for what we do not wish to happen. Each time something dreadful shapes us, our own individual definition of fear becomes more solidified, but the unknown is what defines fear for all of us. With this, I, somewhat irritably, conclude that fear is unavoidable. I suppose no man nor woman can truly defeat fear, and maybe that is what keeps our power in check. Whether you believe in god, the coincidence that is biology, or are apathetic to the origin of life, maybe whatever made us to be what we are, whatever understood our endless potential, knew that our unrelenting power had to be kept in check. Maybe that check was fear. And with that I understand what I am chasing; a Ceryneian Hind that can only be caught by the mythological likes of Hercules, and cannot be imprisoned by such an ordinary man as myself.
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