Truthfully, trying to think of a certain moment, or a time in which I was afraid, I don’t come up with much. Fear, as a concept to me, is an emotion which is experienced at a specific moment in life and then dissipates. I don’t believe I’ll ever quite remember a single specific moment where something made me jump or spooked me.

That being said, there’s another sort of fear that I know exists. An idea in which we don’t experience because something jumped at us suddenly or because we were unsettled, something more substantial and distant, but still something that can have a more real and substantial effect on people. The fear that I remember, and will always understand and deal with, is the sort of existential dread and fear for the world. The fear that is for people, is for life, which comes with an understanding of life and ideas, along with time spent to think and understand those ideas.

The fear that I will always come back to, and the fear that I will remember feeling, cannot be found in a single event I’ll think about and chuckle at how I felt. The fear that I’ll remember are the fears of life I’ve felt, fear of failure, fear of people, fear of purely being myself and interacting with the world. Obviously, I could give a list that would go on for hours if I wanted to, but that isn’t the point I’m getting at. What I’m trying to say is that, I don’t remember much of specific events or times where I was spooked for a few moments. The fear that I remember can’t lie within one specific event, only within myself and the ideas that I’ve come to realize and think about myself, and the world. While those ideas may be wrong, in fact I’m sure that the view of myself and how I see myself is wrong, these are the ideas I’ve spent time with, I’m confident that these fears that I’ve felt and created for myself are more powerful and will forever be more memorable than fears that I felt for a few moments after a sudden event.