Ways to Face Your Fears

    Take a look around the room, as your eyes gaze across the different bodies, just know that almost every single one of them has a fear. Depending on the person, how they choose to react to their fears with vary and differ between every person. Nearly 10% of Americans have a fear in something, with most of the fears revolving around social fears. A fear could also be known as a phobia and there are hundreds of phobias in the world, there’s a phobia for almost anything that you believe could be a fear. The few most common phobias are; arachnophobia (fear of spiders), ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), acrophobia (fear of heights), agoraphobia (fear of open space), and cynophobia (fear of dogs). In life we can either face our fears by choice, unwillingly, or not face the fear at all and run from it.
       One way a person may face their fear is by choice. In my life a fear I chose to face was getting onto I-5 or the trestle. Merging onto the trestle raises my anxiety through the roof and I’m instantly scared of getting into a crash trying to switch lanes. Going fast doesn’t faze me, it’s always just changing lanes that truly makes my heart race. However, most of my doctors appointments are in Everett so I have to use the trestle to get there. I also like to go to concerts, and most concerts are held in Seattle, which means that I have to use the trestle and I-5 in order to get there. So, in order to face all of those fears, I drive to my own appointments and I have been the driver when going to a concert in Seattle. I face those fears every time I go to the doctor and if I’d like to get out of my house and go have fun out of my hometown, then I’ll need to continue to use the trestle.
       Another way to face fears is unwillingly. This one is kind of embarrassing but oh well, it was an actual fear. As a kid I had this weird fear of the vacuum that was in our pool in the backyard. I would actually start to cry out of fear over the thing. Anytime I looked at it it made my heart race and my mind was telling me to get out of the pool. My family members would laugh at me, and my dad would never take the vacuum out of the pool, since the pool needed to stay clean and it messed with the vacuum to take it out and put it back into the pool a bunch of times. Day after day, the vacuum never left the pool and my eyes always stayed on it, and I made sure not to swim near it. Because they never took it out of the pool, I had no other choice but to be okay with it and I told myself that it wasn’t going to suck me up. Now, the only thing that bothers me with it, is how loud it is over the summer time.
       The third way to face a fear is to simply run from it. I am terrified of spiders, and I will not share the same room as one. If I know there’s a spider in the room, then I’m out of it! I will scream and freeze. If there is literally any other person with me I will immediately ask them to dispose of it. They got no business to be in my home, they can stay 3,000 lightyears away from me. Although, they do help with the fly problems over the summer, they still are my top fear. I don’t understand how people can make pets out of those things, they actually make the hairs on my arms stand up. I don’t think I’ll ever not be scared of spiders.
      All of the reactions stated above are all common within people, and there are so many different ways that a person could choose to react to their fear. And depending on the fear could depend on how the person reacts to it. Like my fear of the pool vacuum, I got over that since that thing wasn’t going anywhere, while someone else could get over their fears in other ways. Someone could get over their fear by simply telling themselves over and over again not to be scared, the fear could just go away as they get older, they could go to therapy, or they could even get hypnotized to no longer have that specific fear. However, in my life, between these three fears, I faced them by choice, unwillingly, and by running from them little crawlers!
-Faith Court