Fear

Fear is an interesting emotion,and one that not too many people talk about openly.  I think being fearless is about as possible as being perfect. We teach our children, especially boys, that having fear (or admitting it) equates to being weak. What better way to face your fears than to talk about them. Robert Leahy wrote a book titled Anxiety Free, in which he discusses how we came to live in the "age of anxiety." The average child today, he says, has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.

According to Wikipedia, some of the most common fears include public speaking, death, intimacy, heights, snakes, spiders, rejection, failure, enclosed spaces and even clowns. I can honestly say that I don't fear any of the most common fears, but I do have a fear that is probably more common than I know, but not often discussed.  I have a fear of dementia.

In 1999, when I was 19, I had the opportunity to study abroad in Europe.  I was living in Verona, Italy, and was blessed to travel throughout Italy, and its surrounding countries.  It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I hope to never forget.  I was so acutely aware of this opportunity, and so grateful for it, that I kept a journal of my experiences.  Since then, I've been keeping journals.

In 2004, I watched a film named The Notebook, which is based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks. The film is about a young couple that fell in love in the 1940s.  The story is told by an elderly man in a nursing home reading from a notebook to an elderly woman, a patient in the nursing home.  The woman who is hearing the story has dementia, and does not realize that the story she's hearing is the story of her life being told to her by the love of her life.  At that moment, I realized why I write.  When my grandmother on my father's side passed away, she was nearly 100 years old, and was no longer able to recognize her own children.  I write because I never want to forget.  

Carla Harris wrote a wonderful book called Expect to Win.  In this book, she says that F-E-A-R stands for False Evidence of things Appearing Real.  Timothy 2:9 says "God did not give us the spirit of fear, but of power, courage, and a sound mind".  The best way to dissolve and transform fear is to face it.  Heightened awareness of fear makes it less scary, and talking about fear with people you trust and love helps your realize that you're not alone.

I love my life and the culmination of experiences that I've been fortunate enough to have up to this moment.  Ironically, I've had the opportunity to face this fear head on.  After having my son in 2008, I fell ill and it caused some memory loss.  I continue to be less and less afraid of memory loss because it's already happened to me (to a small extent) and everything turned out just fine.