We aren’t born knowing what fear is.

I’d argue that we learn it young and proceed to spend a decent amount of time reinforcing those accumulations of fearful childhood moments.

When I talk about this elusive fear, I’m referring specifically to moments away from real, imminent danger. (Warranted fear gets immensely simple in moments of real danger.)

I’m rather referring to those moments when nothing is wrong, but everything feels fractured, sharp enough to cut you with its razor-sharp edges; contained moments that swallow us whole, restricting our movement

I possess a lax understanding of what ‘fear’ is and when it has any true right to be present.

Most glaringly, this is in large part due to my neurodivergence. (If you’ve kept up with my writing up until this point, you’ll be more than familiar.) Despite my best efforts to be mentally tough, I have a brain that wholly gets stuck on ideas, delusions, and projections that swallow me whole and spit me out.

My amygdala—the kidney bean-sized firing mechanism near the hippocampus responsible for the decision to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn on command—is constantly being hijacked by a range of strong emotions that come to me in the form of intrusive thoughts.

Add in a chemical imbalance that impairs communication among my neurotransmitters, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for all-consuming fear and panic, even when absolutely nothing is wrong.

I’ve never experienced fear normally because I have an extremely hard time distinguishing between the threats of my internal world and the threats of the external world. Even as I gain awareness of this problem, it’s hard to apply compassion and discernment in those moments that consume me and shut off my higher-level cognition and reasoning.

To me, most stimuli in my day-to-day life register as an imposition of danger (especially the neutral ones). I’m subjected almost against my will to the physical symptoms of danger and duress, and once this process has jolted into action, it’s nearly impossible to reverse. This all happens without my permission, and I’m sort of left to clean up the pieces. To provide an analogy, it’s as if I’m swept out into an ocean by a riptide, but I have to wait until I’m drawn out before swimming back to shore and away from the chaos.

As someone who feels afraid of pretty much everything, I’ve spent a lot of my time in and out of therapy exploring the concept of fear in all its abstractions.

Apart from any diagnosis, I’m a human being, and I experience fear. Fear is largely what has allowed for humanity’s survival since the dawn of time. Fear is supposed to signal real danger and influence our responses accordingly. Fear can be a remarkably useful tool for protecting ourselves and making the best decisions that promote our well-being and livelihoods.

My most deep, genuine fear comes from wanting to live a full life. I want to do, taste, hold, and see everything in its entirety. In wanting these finite experiences, though, I must reckon with the fact that at the end of this great, big life, I’m going to die. And that scares me.

Like most other humans, I’m called into my purpose and action by this simple fact of mortality. Time eventually runs out, and I have no intention to waste it. Hence, most of my fear crises: I don’t want my OCD and irrational fear to monopolize any more of my time than it already has. (I mourn this idea.)

By breaking down fear, you’ve got the big, meta-existential fears that quietly—or loudly, if you have a brain like mine—linger in the shadows of the day. Then there are smaller fears that are more immediate and situation-dependent and slip into long, hazy days. I can personally handle the big fears of life. It’s the smaller things that trip me up most.

Fear comes from a sincere place of caring. We want things that we care about badly enough that we agonize at the thought of losing them or never even having the opportunity to have them in the first place.

I’m not the first to note that humans are pretty much solely motivated by fierce desire, which has led us to do some pretty incredible things. In welcoming desire, you must also make a place for fear.

Fear is not all bad and uncomfortable. At least it doesn’t have to be.

Fear can provide us with very valuable insight as to what our values are. And, when properly recognized and understood in the grand scheme of things, it can be a powerful motivator for our next steps.

Everything has a light and a dark side. In that same vein, fear can either paralyze us in place or propel us into action towards a better experience.

And don’t get me wrong: I’m all for not hyper-intellectualizing one’s emotions, fear included.

But I think that every feeling contains some shred of a core truth. This information can influence the next steps that ultimately lead us back to who we truly are. And what a gift it can be to find our way back home!