fear.

1. great day--slept in, basketball game, dinner with friends, relaxing night.
2. i like comments on my blog (!).
3. missing friends from home; i'm ready to see my people again. i wish they could just all come visit at once so i could have school friends and home friends all in one place.

the title says it all. that itty bitty four letter word can wreak havoc in this life, this world. fear can run people's lives and control actions and words and even thoughts. i can't imagine what it would be like to live with a phobia. we all have our fears and our aversions, but to have an intense phobia of something would be awful. i guess i have some pretty run-of-the-mill fears. i'm afraid of not being all that i can be. i'm afraid of change. i'm afraid of missing out on opportunities because of my fear of change. i'm afraid of roller coasters (note last bucket list item), i'm afraid of dying a painful or early death, i'm afraid of jellyfish (!), and i can be afraid of flying. all of these things seem so evolutionary though. as humans we are supposed to fear things that could prevent the passing on of our genes. but how to some people end up afraid of snakes, other spiders, others sharks, and others heights? it's weird, isn't it, how we all have the same basic idea behind some fears but they manifest in different ways? it seems, then, that a combination of learned and innate factors would make fears different yet the same. and we all have egos, so a fear of failure would be expected. but what is important to each of us and what we don't want to fail at varies so much. the moral of this post: life is complicated, and fear makes it more complicated. while i just want to be my best person and be happy and live my life, the fear (counterintuitively) holds me back.