To Those Who Fear Too Deeply

Let yourself go.

All the times and dates ringing alarms incessantly in your head, all the missed opportunities where you feel you’ve left an undiscovered piece of your potential self, all the thin strings of friendships drastically severed loose or knotted much too soon, all the aching, excruciating pain that has long remained a paperweight to your brittle paper heart— Just let it go.

If you have so ardently convinced yourself that all the sharp, silent sufferings you wake up to will just one day dissipate from your troubled mind, then you have chosen to believe in one very dangerous, falsely-reassuring hope. Because it won’t. It really won’t.

Your fears will not outgrow itself, but will grow with you. Your frightened inner voice will not cease to whisper more worry into your conscious mind, as if your subconscious hasn’t already had enough. The complexity of your mind will not untangle itself from the many dangerous wires twisted within it—as your mind is already a bomb, just waiting to be detonated at any given moment, with any wrong move to loosen yourself from your own anxiety.

You are now hanging by a very thin, overstretched thread. And here you ache from how crippled you have become while hanging. But it doesn’t have to end there.

First, you have to make sure of one thing: Do not confuse empowerment with surrender. There is nothing empowering about merely letting things be. You may have warmly tucked yourself under a blanket, constantly hiding from the hovering monsters of insecurity that have haunted you since childhood, but you cannot stay underneath it forever. You may have first swallowed your fears as a little ball of fire, but you cannot just let it consume you from the inside out.

Letting things be will only harm you in the long run, because by then, your fears will have already grown more swollen within you. Second, you must understand that time can either lead to your demise, or your redemption. Remaining passive throughout time, and allowing your fears to co-exist with you as harmlessly as you think it does, will only make you surrender to your own internal battles.

Choosing to stay asleep from the harsh realities you face will only keep the nightmares going for longer. The sooner you realize this, the better, since you cannot redeem yourself from your own pain by keeping yourself paralyzed by it. In fact, the ironic thing is, literally no one else can show you the way out, no one else can make an escape plan out of this, but yourself.

Because just as you know your own fears all too well, you may also know yourself deeply enough to maneuver out of it. You know what it does to you. You know how you react from it.

And so, as you’ve been going along with this longer than you may have wanted, you can know yourself better in the whole process—maybe not at the moment, but you’ll have to eventually. Right now, what you really need is some freedom from yourself.

There is, indeed, a limit to how many times you can blame other people or circumstances for your fears, because at some point, you know you’ve grown up to be conscious enough of its own mechanisms against you. So take a step back from your own thinking. Stop listening to the murmurs of your instinctive, distressed voice and take a good look at yourself, and how you perceive things.

Then, from there, you have to humble yourself enough to note your own flaws, because you certainly will find something. You certainly will see how all your fears, though separate from yourself, have taught you self-imprisonment. And if at this point in your reading this still strikes and relates to you, then you have learned to imprison yourself for much too long. But forget that now. See beyond that. And nonetheless, learn to separate your grown self from your troubled self, so you may learn to see and understand how and why your fears have crept into you, how it latches itself so easily onto your own personality, and realize from where you may draw strength within yourself to combat against it once and for all.

Remember, pain will never fail to make itself known to you of its existence.

You already carry it with every waking moment, and with every tormenting nightmare you’ve endured. You’ve already recycled it enough to painfully let salt water outpour from your eyes, over and over, night after night. You already know how beaten down you are. You have had enough, yet it still lingers. Because your fears will not rid itself from you. It exists primarily to consume you. But it would not exist without you feeding it.

Now, give yourself time, not to just wait for your wounds to heal and let your fears dissolve, but time to study the intricacies of your beautiful being, and all the little cracks your fears have mercilessly created to break you up.

Once you realize how horribly you have ached, and once you are abhorred by the thought of letting your scarred soul shrivel even weaker, you will then protest. You will then muster up the courage to finally detach who you are, suffering and shaken, from who you want to be—who you know you can be. By then, you will have grown much too strong and wise to even consider your fears worthy of fearing. By then, you will have outgrown yourself, and stepped out of the darkness that you thought was all that ever existed anymore.

With that mindset, you are then stripping off from your fears the power to take control of how long it can stay with you. Because you will have learned to love yourself enough and know that you do not deserve to feel the the way you still do.

You will have already become a new self, a new being, a new whole.

So stop it with the troubling ideas. Stop it. It will not let you go unless you let go of it first. And don’t distance yourself to forget. Distance yourself to remember. And eventually, conquer.