Snakes!

Are you afraid of snakes? Or spiders or dogs or the dark? None of those things give me pause. In fact, I actually like dogs and snakes and spiders, and I’m totally comfortable in the dark. But there are some things that give me the heebie-jeebies. (And no, I’m not telling what they are!) The point is, we all have our fears. We are not born with these phobias, though. We learned them, either from our parents or our peers or the society we grew up in or even from personal experience. A painful encounter when young with a school of jellyfish at the beach could leave someone with a fear of jellyfish or the ocean or even water in general.

Are you afraid to present yourself to the world as the "opposite" gender? Do you think people will laugh and point, or even physically attack you? Sure, they might do those things, just as a snake or a dog might bite you. But you have to ask yourself if you were born afraid to be yourself, or if it's a lot more likely that you learned this fear, too?

Do you hate someone or something? Do you believe that hate is the opposite of love? I don't think so, because both hate and love are intense emotional reactions that generally require an intimate knowledge of the object of that emotion. I believe that the opposite of love is not hate - it’s indifference. And the opposite of hate? Acceptance, because most hatred has its roots in fear. If nothing else, it is rooted in fear of the unknown or of the different. Acceptance of something goes a long way towards removing our fear of it, and that loss of fear in turn takes almost all the wind out of hatred’s sails.

Fear exists for a very good reason. It is a survival mechanism that gives us pause to keep us from doing possibly dangerous things. But it also reinforces those feelings that prove to us that we are alive - when expecting danger, the heart pounds, the breathing gets faster, the senses are heightened. Even if the danger never comes, we still experience the adrenaline rush. That’s the basic idea behind amusement park rides: pay someone else to scare you, to get the adrenaline going. Sometimes the fear reaction is almost addictive, but the actual fear itself usually is not pleasant and can even be detrimental to our quality of life.

For that reason, most of us are not happy with our fears. One of the booming businesses of the 90’s involves teaching people to conquer their phobias and fears, especially when they interfere with everyday life. Their premise is that if you learned a fear, you can unlearn it, and I think that's true. The mind is a wondrous - and terrible - thing in its flexibility. Maybe we do need help in doing it, but if we put our minds to it, we CAN unlearn the fears that paralyze us. And with our help, maybe others can get past their fears of us, the different ones, to dissolve their hatred of us and arrive at some sort of acceptance. But first we have to get past our own snakes. We need to be happy with who we are before we can expect others to do the same.

"Remember how they taught you, how much of it was fear. Refuse to hand it down - that legacy stops here." - Melissa Etheridge -