Fear. The gut wrenching sensation, as if your entrails are being held by clippers and pulled out. The pit of your stomach becomes a void, larger and larger as the seconds pass and darkness is palpable, it is in front of your eyes. Death appears to be a welcome inevitability just so that you can avoid the engulfing fear.You perspire as if the glistening moisture would wash the fear away but to no avail.your heart beat is no more rhythmic and pounds like a judge's gavel until you feel you may not have another beat.You look around like a helpless yearling expecting the ax on your neck, any moment. Blood would be all over and the end will arrive.You cant sweat or dilate your pupils anymore. Any minute and the fear would overtake your senses.You are counting the senses that are still functional. Eyes can partially see, ears can partially hear your own heart pound heavily, nose is smelling the stench of the ugly ugly fear in your deepest core and skin feels the harbinger of death and prickles, gives you goose pimples like you are standing stark naked in the arctic winter.
I have felt this every single time I have undertaken something that is beyond my little existence, an exam, a rafting experience without knowing how to swim, skydiving from a plane when the instructor says there are odds that we may not come back alive; that the concept of probability in mathematics for which you were searching a real life phenomenon to apply it on, you have found it the moment your partner cum instructor attached to your waist whispers that think of god and jump.This is what I have felt going for some of the toughest exams in my life, be it accepting a truth in front of my parents, friends, going for reciting a poem in front of a crowd of 200 people, compering a show in front of 2000. Be it trying to learn how to swim and hold my breath in the blue water, as comforting as it is around me,I sink and find it impossible to hold it for even one more second and the comforting water enters the mind and eyes and tries to take you towards the tunnel with the white light at the end of it.Be it gathering up the courage to go and talk to my boss about a pending presentation or to go to my dad and let him know that my current job may not last. Be it a nightmare where an invisible entity is pressing down my neck till I cant move my fingers, or scream out. Even if I scream, no one appears to hear me. They are all around there smiling but no one can hear.Fear does this to you. It makes you believe that you are nothing but a useless piece of shit who is about to be annihilated from the face of existence and wait and watch till it gets you. It makes you believe in the panic that your own sane mind presents in front of you and you become nothing but a caged animal about to be killed or a kidnapped little girl about to be beheaded when your loved ones cant hear you and cannot get you out and you just wait and watch..
But you try, you try to move that little finger, you try to calm your freaking brain down, you try to move one muscle at a time, you try to remember a smile, a kind face, a warm hand just to make sure fear does not reach the core. You try one step at a time and slowly you muster enough galls to challenge the fear.You challenge it to appear again even when you are deathly afraid of it.You keep challenging and threatening it little by little until it raises its hands in surrender.Guess what, you just took the leap of faith and jumped from the sky accelerating at 2G's towards the earth and you just won against it.
- Supriya
