What are you scared of?

What scares you? I don’t mean this question in the sense of what frightens you, or startles you, or makes you hide under the bed, quaking, until someone is kind enough to put the movie off and put the lights on – I’m taking about fear.

Speaking for myself, I’m scared of being exposed. No, not the ‘Oops, I seem to have left my pants at home’ kind of thing – I’m scared of people who know me well enough to tell that I’m full of shit. I don’t know if this is something that everyone goes through at some point or another, but recently, I had a chance to put all of this into perspective.

We’re all of us pretenders, to one degree or another. There are those lucky few who are so comfortable with who they are that they never need to pretend to be anything but themselves (how I envy them). There are the others, who muddle amiably through life with a bit of a façade, but just enough to keep them going, and not so much that it gets in their way. Then there’s the category that I fall into – those who, for some reason or another, find the need to constantly wear a mask, and constantly pray for a chance to take it off. Even in writing this, I find myself reworking sentences again and again to minimize the strength of what I’m saying, in the hope that people don’t realize exactly what I’m talking about – which kind of defeats the purpose of this article. It’s pure idiocy, but there you have it.

Anyway.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough (even though I didn’t realize it at the time), to meet someone with whom I’d never have to wear a mask – she, quite honestly, was prepared to accept me for exactly who I was – which, as it turns out, she knew a sight better than I did. This is where the sad part comes in – instead of being grateful, I got scared. I’d been working at that particular façade for quite some time, and I was pretty proud of it, to tell the truth. To have someone turn up and say, ‘Okay, nice try, but you’re still a coward underneath it all, aren’t you?’ is unsettling, to say the least. I should have been grateful. I should have realized what I had (hindsight is great, isn’t it? It lets you see exactly what a fool you were, back then, and allows you the knowledge that no matter how far you get, you’ll still be a fool when you look back from further on). What I should have done, and what I could have done, and what I did do are three very separate things – but you know how it goes. I lost her, and with it, I lost any chance I had with her.

I guess what scared me was exactly how well she knew me, to the point of voicing thoughts that I’d fought long and hard to keep trampled. Every man has hidden depths, yes, and in some cases, we’d prefer that those depths remain hidden.

People like me, we pride ourselves on being independent – at least, in thought. We tell ourselves that since we’ve had some pain in our lives, that the best thing for us to do is to hide what and who we are, and especially what we’ve been through to what we’ve become. As it turns out, what I was hiding was simply myself, and what I was losing out on, was life.

In this particular instance, I’d convinced myself that what I’d been through had made me completely emotionless, that nothing and nobody could shake me. It’s really, really frightening then, when someone tells you (albeit in a poem)

‘I’ve seen the colour of your spine, and it’s not the invincible shroud black that you paid for…more like the colour of lukewarm chai on a cold afternoon.’

Or something like that.

Leaving aside the truth of that sentence, the simple fact that someone could know me well enough to voice my deepest fears – well, I ran. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not really ashamed of it either. I won’t bother to say you would have done the same – nobody can know what they’d do until faced with the actuality of it.

It would be nice to assume that no one could know you better that you know yourself. And it’s terrifying when you find someone who knows you better than you know yourself.

I did learn one thing, though.
Don’t be scared.