We often develop elaborate reasons to keep our fears contracting our potential; the more these fears restrict our development, the more they eventually become apart of our personality. We often spend our lives trapped behind cocoons of limitations with barely enough wiggle room to reach for love; unfortunately, and fortunately, our possibilities and potential rest on the other side of the fear. Even in my own life I avoided becoming a writer simply because of fear, and would procrastinate with justifications that my thoughts wouldn’t be respected; causing me to hide behind timidity, which resulted in the manifestation of my fears.

Is it odd to say our fears become us? By shaping and molding our actions, eventually limiting our potential by constricting us to a persona that’s comfortable and likable, I would say Yes. Perhaps, our fears are made reality through our ruminations; for example, the fear of releasing our art, because of judgement or feeling inadequate, results in our work never being released; which then validates our anxiety and contracts our potential. We become villains’ in our story, and fear begins eating away our lives, from business to love to sex to friendship, fear becomes our greatest companion and foe. However, permanence is not an attribute of fear, and while it may have affected our lives chronically, perenniality is not a fact in regards to fear; contracting our reach for love, our faith to leave the house, restricting us from meeting the world, and extinguishing the fire of sacral, and creative, energy at the sight of beauty–not physical beauty but a sort of fullness and completion that allows you to embrace another person–our relationship to fear needs shifting.

Because the daily battle of combatting anxiety is so draining, we often retreat into the fear instead of carrying on the eternal confrontation; fear must become a signal, an alarm, for sublimation. Only through a change in our relationship to fear can we develop the confidence to allow for our transformation; this aim is a separation of fear from our bodies by allowing fear to serve its rightful place as a sensation instead of an identity. This definition of beauty may be the most uplifting approach to pain, heartbreak, anxiety, and our haunting past; with all its’ guilts and regrets this approach is, but not only uplifting, most importantly, liberating. This walk through fear requires commitment, devotion, and recognizing the shifts and changes happening within us; often, in the midst of overthinking we fail to realize that we can stop the thoughts in there tracks. These thoughts become merely visitors that have overstayed their welcome and can be asked to leave as one would ask a guest, “What you about to get into“, or “It‘s getting late aint it” or even when you are completely fed up, “You need a ride home”.

My focus, throughout the essay, is the sublimation of consciousness and turning fear into a jump starter for action; regardless of however much our fears may seem eternal, the possibility of living a life confronting fear is possible, and becomes encouraging as the conquering of our old selves extend, and refine, our personality. Fear is often perceived as immutable when it spontaneously disrupts our lives, but the idea of being trapped by fear is laughable once we acknowledge the emotion as merely a sensation. Fear is removable, not permanent; internal, having more to do with us than other people; changeable, not paralyzing. Fear, with a perspective of transmutation, becomes a opportunity to evolve ourselves.