« Let me tell you about
scared. Your heart is beating so hard I can feel it through your hands. There’s
so much blood and oxygen pumping through your brain it’s like rocket fuel.
Right now you could run faster and you can fight harder. You can jump higher than
ever in your life and you are so alert it’s like you can slow down time. What’s
wrong with scared? Scared is a superpower!
Doctor Who, Listen (2014)
Fear is an emotion. Fear is what is
keeping you alive when you feel danger. So basically it is the most normal
emotion that you can feel. It is an instinctive emotion that works when your
life or your health is in danger. Without this primary instinct, we wouldn’t be
here today. Without fear, we cannot go on and move forward.
As anybody has already experienced it once
in his life, fear is a body behavior: you feel unsafe, your heart pace is
increasing, every muscle of your body is taut, you breathe faster and you feel
pins and needles in your skin. All your senses are in alert. You can do
anything in your power to save your life. You’re ready to do what it takes to
stay alive.
Fear is a chemical message produced by your
brain with the information it can find in a certain context with your five senses:
what you see, what you hear, what you feel (touch and emotion), and sometimes
what you can smell and what you can taste. With all these information, the
brain makes a message telling its hormones (adrenaline) by the nervous system
to act to “save your life”. Then, your brain has two choices to save you (or,
you have two choices to save yourself): run, or fight. Either you can choose to
run, to leave or not to deal with what scares you, or you can fight it, find a
solution, stay and deal with it.
We all experienced fear at least once in
our life. When you’re a child, you don’t already know how to make the difference
between what is real and what is the creation of your own imagination. When you
grow up, you start to have phobias about spiders, dogs, heights, water, dark,
etc. And you begin to think that fear is an inconvenience, a feeling that
always keeps you down, that you can’t move forward with it. As adults, we tend
to think that fear is for children. That we have to deal with what scares us.
And it can be true when your phobias ruin your life. But we forget that it is
our survival instinct. Even if sometimes it is hard or annoying, we CAN’T live
without fear.
« I know you’re afraid, but being afraid is alright.
Because didn’t anybody ever tell you? Fear is a superpower. Fear can make you
faster and cleverer and stronger. And one day you’re gonna come back to this
barn and on that day you’re going to be very afraid indeed. But that’s okay,
because if you’re very wise and very strong fear doesn’t have to make you cruel
or cowardly. Fear can make you kind. It doesn’t matter if there’s nothing under
the bed or in the dark so long as you know it’s okay to be afraid of it. So
listen. If you listen to anything else, listen to this. You’re always gonna be
afraid even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like a companion, a constant
companion, always there. But that’s okay because fear can bring us together.
Fear can bring you home. I’m gonna leave you something just so you’ll always
remember. Fear makes companions of us all. »
Doctor Who, Listen (2014)
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