Fear Essay

Mirrors

For a long time, almost as long as I can remember, I have been afraid of mirrors. This fear was spawned from things such as the “Bloody Mary” trick, where you were supposed to turn off the bathroom lights and spin around, saying “Bloody Mary” three times, to make her show up in the mirror behind you with a knife when you turned the lights back on. I never tried, and I always adamantly refused to do so. This fear was made even stronger when I entered the stage of my life where watching horror movies became entertaining to me. A strong majority of horror movies have a bathroom scene and, within said scene, something frightening happens either involving the shower or the mirror. Now I will be doing something completely normal, like brushing my teeth, and when I lean down to spit out the toothpaste, I always expect to see something behind me when I come back up.
            

“Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.” (Edberg) Children aren’t afraid. There is a time period where we are so young and so innocent that we are simply curious. We wonder what the hairy thing with all the legs is, and when we ask our mother, we receive screaming and fright as an answer. Fear is something our parents teach us just as much as they teach us the language we speak. It isn’t something we are born with, simply because we have to know what something is, at least somewhat, to know to be afraid of it. The only exceptions to that are supernatural events, death, and the fear of the unknown.

“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.” (Edberg) As stated previously, children are simply curious. That curiosity they possess so innocently is what, in a sense, protects them from fear. They just want to know what things are and to learn more about the world from that. Eventually a mother’s reprimanding will reach a point, psychologically, where the children become afraid. Hearing “don’t talk to strangers” over and over again implies that there is something wrong with strangers, that something bad will happen if you talk to them. The truth of the matter is that most strangers are probably not trying to harm you, but we have learned that it is better to be afraid of them than to risk said stranger being a serial killer or rapist.

Aside from learning fears from our families, we also learn fears from society and the media, including movies. For some reason, a lot of humans enjoy the feeling of being afraid. Perhaps it is the adrenaline we get, the fight or flight scenario, or maybe we are all just a bit masochistic. Near Halloween, we find amusement parks with mazes full of people covered in goopy makeup and fake blood that will scream at us in an attempt to scare us, and they will typically succeed. We watch gory movies, jumpy movies, and movies that are just downright creepy, because we like the fear that we feel, even if we don’t want to admit it to ourselves. After all, fear is mental. If we didn’t want to be afraid, all we would have to do is remember that no, a dead girl with long hair covering her face that is disturbingly mangled is not going to come out of the television and kill us.

Everyone is expected to be afraid of something. Some people are more scared than others. Some fears are completely irrational, like my fear of mirrors instilled in me from the excessive amounts of scary movies I watch, and some fears are perfectly sensible, like being afraid of having a fatal car accident. While fear can hinder some parts of like, like making me afraid to even go in the bathroom after seeing a horror movie, it also protects us. Even though most situations aren’t something to be afraid of, fear is like a safety net. If I wasn’t afraid of that stranger my mother always told me not to talk to, would I be that girl on the news found raped and murdered while walking home one night?

Works Cited

Edberg, Henrik. "22 Inspirational Quotes on Fear." The Positivity Blog. N.p., 2012. Web. Web. 23 Oct.       2012.