fearing unicorn horns or how awesomeness is made.
When I was 12 I was afraid of fat and ran mile after mile on an empty stomach.
When I was 16 I was afraid of failing to become my father. And this is what I want to speak about, this fear shoved down our throats since we first fell over the kindergarten doorstep.
It is everywhere, this fear.
It greets us from ads and reality shows; says hello whenever a cop walks by and it cries for our attention from newspaper headlines. It asks for a dollar from our favorite coffee shops. It claps its hands from holy print, and screams our names whenever two clenched hands emerge from behind the corner. It eats us alive, and never yields unless we force it down from its pedestal.
And the pedestal is high.
After all society runs on fear, and would cry burned bills if something would change. And it would be right to do so. Because if we had not any fear, we would no longer work, or obey laws we do not agree with. We would stop caring for tomorrow, and we’d keep putting our hands on the stove no matter how many times we felt its heat. We would crumble, and take what we know as society with us.
But it is not all fear that is this crucial for our survival. There is the fear of not being accepted, of doing something extraordinary, of kicking a hole in our comfortable world and kiting up to that special place where everything is more awesome than cotton candy, as healthy as kale, and more beautiful than defined calves holding a lover against another.
There is also the fear of standing out. There is the fear of being your very best.
What we have here is a fear that does not help us to survive but functions as a muffler for our creativity. What we have here is a fear that makes us less alive than we could be, and less productive than we should. And if we should be something, just a sole thing in this huge world of ours, it is productive.
We should live to produce our very best, create our very best, and make our lives a sheer outcry of what this very best does to our hearts. We should let it be spelled out across our ribs and tattooed across our fingertips, so that everything we touch bears the mark of what we are meant to do and be and leave for our children to look upon with supernovas dripping from their retinas.
If only we could get rid of this fear, that is. And to do this we need to go past our comfort zone and enter that which lies beyond; shrug off our trembling lips and tell the shadow to go suck a pear somewhere. We need to trust ourselves to survive in this unknown territory, tell ourselves that we are indeed strong enough to live in a state of constant awesomeness, and awesomeness cannot be reached without the movement of our feet.
There is more to the issue though.
After all, I had no problem going outside my comfort zone when I was 16, and still I raged through every night and told my father to call his secretary if he needed to talk. Still I did this shit, felt worse and then I did some more. I was afraid of failure back then, and thought it would be better to never try because if I never tried I would never fail.
Being a loser demands less of you than being the most successful piece of unicorn horn in the world.
And this has to change. For all of us. We have to see that there is nothing to fear in failure, we can laugh in its face and say tough luck and I will nail it the next time.
Society has, of course, provided assistance for this fear to grow, and this is why it is so hard to let go of it. Because as with all these other kinds of fear we have been fed pictures of what it looks like; horrible images that only serves to make us not try and then we are back in that comfort zone, and the television is there as well.
We have to do something about it; shove the fear full of dynamite and let it explode someplace where tons of curtains hide every square inch of its remains. Then we can say I will be my very best and mean it. Then can we start running and never look back, and then we can stand on our toes until our calves are strong enough to hold us tightly against whatever we love most. Then we can grip our full potential, and be most awesome piece of shit we can.
*****