Fear

"It seems that writers (the creatures that need to be isolated to work) are the people who need to understand people the most." - Audrey Reifler

This post has spawned from a conversation I had with a friend of mine.

Why do we hide away from others the parts of ourselves that we most want to be noticed?

That's a damn good question. And no, I don't speak French.

I think it's because we're afraid- afraid that someone won't like the bits of ourselves that are the most dear to us. That we will be hated for who we are. So we build a facade- a stockade, if you will, around ourselves. We paint pictures of the inside of the castle on the walls, but they're so abstract and full of symbolism and metaphor that it's hard to figure out what it all means.

Fear, I believe, is the strongest driving force we have. I won't hesitate to kill you if your existence is definitely and unmistakably going to lead to my death (say, if you were holding the only piece of edible substance left on the planet). (Okay, I would hesitate. But I would still do it. Probably. In theory.) I will do my best to live. And so will you.

In Torchwood: Children of Earth the British government was willing to do terrible things in order to protect their own children from the aliens. Fear is powerful. As Dumbledore says,"What you (should) fear most is fear itself."

Fear is at its most powerful in everyday life in adolescence. There's so much we don't know. A great, huge, whopping amount that is so big we don't even know how big it is. And that is scary. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is fear. And often vice versa.

Life itself. What is it? What are we supposed to do with it? How do we do it? How do we make the most of it? Those are the big ones. Then there's all the little ones, which are actually scarier, I think. They're closer to home, even for those of us (*cough* me *cough*) who like the Big Concepts. There are only eight or nine of you followers, right now, and most of us are in our teens, or not far from them. Even the few that aren't can (probably) identify with this stuff. Just because you're older doesn't mean you know stuff about the rest of your lives. It's just worse for us because we've had less time to grapple with the problem, and have more of our lives in front of us.

Life's scary, but it's what we have. And I'm sorry I don't have a segway paragraph to tie that in to the rest of the post. It's a bit too optimistic to fit in, but too bad. It's almost 11 o'clock, and I'm tired.

I'll leave you to either sleep or ponder this, or do something else. I, for one, am going with the first.