Overcome Fear

Few things scare me in this world.  It used to be the opposite.  As an adolescent, I began the majority of my days with a nervous breakdown.  But since then I've come to realize that while fear can have its place, for the most part it is a harmful and needless thing.  Something will either happen or it won't.  Worrying isn't going to change that, at least not for the better.

Instead I try to be optimistic.  If I'm going somewhere I've never been before where I know not a soul, I don't think about the risks.  I don't think about what I can lose or about my own inexperience relative to those around me.  Instead I take joy in the novelty of the  experience.  At worst it will make for a good story.  It's like a challenge to see how many difficulties I can overcome, and I'm going for a top score. 

To overcome difficulties, you may need to develop a healthy amount of masochism.  You learn to find something good in the pain you're dealt.  Perhaps a better word to use is selflessness.  It's hard to be afraid if you don't care what happens to you, or if you don't believe it particularly matters what happens to you.  Life will go on.  We learn from mistakes and adapt.  Death comes first to those who can't adapt, and the ones that can't adapt are the ones who don't learn, and the ones who don't learn are the ones that never try anything because they are too afraid.  So to think that your fears are protecting you from harm... this may very well not be the case.  Your fears prevent you from growing, which is a much bigger harm in the long run.

The first step toward selflessness is gaining a strong sense of self.  Figure out who you are, what's important to you, what you have to offer the world.  Learn, know, and be confident with who you are; then it won't matter who does what to you, because you know who you are and you know that no one else can touch that; no one but you can change who you are.  And once you know this, you can forget about it.  You can let it out of the forefront of thought to slip into your subconscious, making room for more important things.

You can spend more time outside your own mind and start living for other people.  Instead of worrying about how people see you, you think about what you can do for them.  Don't think, "What if I make a bad impression?"  Think, "What if I can make an impression?"  Strong impressions are what reach people; whether their impression is good or bad, they will remember you.  Most people think a not-bad impression is the same as a good one.  It is not.  A not-bad impression is a non-impression.  You didn't do anything bad, but that doesn't mean you're good by default.  You didn't do anything good either.  You didn't do anything.  You are both not-bad and not-good.  You are nothing.  People are indifferent on the subject of you.

Which brings us back to fearlessness.  You have to act, and acting involves some degree of fearlessness always.  And whatever you're doing may or may not be important, but if you do it withour fear, people notice that.  So if what you're doing does matter, your confidence might just inspire confidence in others to join you, to take up a belief in what you're doing because you've created in them a belief in you.

Of course, while this manner of living does allow you a freedom from a great many fears, it can create a fear that may not have been there before.  When you are selfless, when you try to live for others, you may become struck by the fear of indifference, of ignorance, of dispassion.  What if there's somebody who cannot be reached?  Somebody who will neither talk nor listen, who will not communicate?  This one hits me from time to time, but it too is best avoided.  Because once you let in one fear, you open the door for the rest.  Your mind is full of neuroconnections that link everything like a chain.  One fear connects to another which connects to another and before you know it, all the fears you've ever felt are swirling around uncontrollably in your mind preventing you from thinking about anything else, preventing you from seeing, paralyzing you from acting.

Which is why it's good to not spend too much time in your own mind.  Live selflessly.  Live for others.  And don't worry about indifference.  There will always be people who won't hear what you have to say.  But don't base your happiness on whether or not your actions are well-received.  Do the things you love, and take happiness from the simple fact that you're doing them.  And if you affect even just one person out of one hundred-- seeing that one spark of inspiration, which you helped create, is a high like no other.