Any Advice?

Dear Me,

            Today I am terrified; terrified I will never make it. I will never achieve my dreams. All of the hard work I have done will have been for nothing, destined to leave me with only arduous memories. For a while now, it has felt as if all I’ve been doing is struggling. Struggling to motivate myself, hanging from a cliff by only the smallest strand of faith that I will be able pull myself back to safety, that I will ever be on sure footing again. I am afraid that if I jump and am able to fly that I will awake to find myself crushed by the weighty realization that all my success was just a dream. There are so many things I want to do and people I want to meet, but I am so afraid that once I begin my journey I will make a wrong turn, never realizing that it was wrong. I am afraid I will lose myself in an illusion that I’m making the right decisions to procure the future I so desire. I’m also filled with fear that only after I have achieved what I want, I will discover that it does not fulfill or make me happy, that it was never what I truly wanted. Do I know myself? Will I ever know myself? Is what I think I want now what I will still want in the future? What if I change my mind and that change only throws me to rock bottom? I’m scared, but of what? Am I scared of failing or of succeeding? Can I be afraid of both? It’s paralyzing, this fear. It’s suffocating me, yet I still have room to fear that I will never break its bind. I’m sick of being afraid, yet day after day I continue to stagnate in inaction. I guess I’m not sick enough. Why? If I were to shed my fear, I think I could be amazing. I think I could achieve all I want and more, so why don’t I? Why?  If I was truly honest, I guess I would have to say it’s because though this fear is draining me, it is something I know and can recognize, something familiar. It’s comfortable. It feels like a shield that is protecting me from being duped, from being led astray; it feels like trusty caution. And… now that I think about it, that feeling is of what I should be most wary, mistaking fear for caution. Caution can be helpful, fear never will be. Fear is what holds me back; it is the kiss of death. So, dearest me, my advice today...?

Fear: Stuck in a Bind

Within a musical named The Civil War, there is a piece, "The Peculiar Institution." In this piece there is a group of lyrics that really speak to me. They are as follows:
       "And it feels more like dying than living when somebody ain't free."
Though these lyrics are apt to describe the situation the actor's are portraying, I feel they can also be applied to other situations. When the words are seen alone, out of context of the musical, their meaning can begin to relate to many situations. I consider fear to be one of the strongest binds against a person's freedom, and as the lyrics say, a life without freedom feels more like death.

With the conclusion that fear is an enemy of freedom and a restriction to a fulfilled life, I am similarly reminded of the poem "A dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes:        

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode? This makes me not only question the future of that deferred deam, but also further encourages me to ponder the future of the deferring dreamer. What happens to the people who defer their dreams? Why did they defer thier dreams? Did fear keep them from fulfilling their dreams? Do they die with the regret that they never sought to answer their greatest "what if" or greatest "I wish?" Do they die feeling as if they had never lived? Do they wish they had lived chasing their dreams rather than slowly dying in a nightmare? Do they find relief from the burden of regret only in death? And to think, that burden began with a bind: fear.

How much freer would they have been without fear clinging to their hearts and chaining their souls? Without that bind, life would have been their's for the taking, freedom absolute. If they had persued life in the fashion they had deepest wished, rather than as the aimeless wanderer fear had molded them into, they could have died knowing that they had lived. Their last breath, the freest they ever had.

Fear and Other Limiting Mindsets

So today, as usual, I was thinking and this is what I’ve concluded: humans must molt mindsets the way snakes molt skin; it is necessary for survival, though it’s probably nicer to remain in a mindset most familiar. That comfort must be lost in order to grow. That comfort, given long enough, will become stifling, snuffing out not only our ability to grow, but also our ability to survive and thrive. However, we should not simply shed our old mindset and leave it behind to degrade; it was once a part of us and should remain as a reminder of where we’ve been, where we don’t want to return. New and fresh ideas are necessary for growth, and shed mindsets will serve as markers of the stale and narrow-minded concepts we no longer need. We can also apply this notion to fear; it’s a mindset we have to shed if we wish to become something great. Like the massive snakes which molted many skins to become so, molt enough mindsets and we’ll have impressive growth too. We can never grow if we continue to writhe in the stifling skin that is our all-consuming fear. So, shed the fear or die.