My Biggest Fear
“What is your biggest fear?”
“What?”
“We’re getting to know each other. So, it’d be fun if we went around the table and said what our biggest fears were!”
“Mine’s sea urchins! They look so scary.”
The group bursts into laughter.
“Good thing we don’t live near a beach.”
“So… what’s yours?”
I hesitate for a second before answering, “The dark.”
“Fair enough,” someone chimes in.
I used to be. I’m not anymore, and for quite some time I haven’t been particularly scared of anything. What a stupid concept! Biggest fear! Why would I be scared of anything? Just face the stupid thing, and it’s done.
I like to believe I am my own biggest critic. I pick apart every little detail about myself and what I do until all that is left is nothing.
I can tell you exactly where I went wrong. I can tell you what I should have said instead, how I should have stood, how I should have looked, how I should have known. A simple interaction becomes a witness to my failures. I can take an ordinary Tuesday and cross-examine it until it confesses to something. I am very good at this. Almost frighteningly good.
I know all my weak spots. I know every argument I have lost, every opportunity I have fumbled, every sentence I replayed later and wished I could swallow back. I’ve spent so long building this case against myself that I consider myself lost if there's competition. Not because I’m particularly horrible, but because in my mind I lack substance.
And perhaps that is why I am so afraid of being known.
Not because someone might dislike me. Dislike is survivable. People are allowed to dislike you for all sorts of reasons, most of them having very little to do with you.
What frightens me is something much more humiliating.
That someone might look closely enough and agree with me.
That they might notice that I am not as intelligent as I pretend to be, or as interesting, or as capable, or as composed. That they might see all the things I have spent years quietly collecting as evidence against myself and say, Oh. So this is who you are.
Not I don’t like you.
Not even You’re disappointing.
Just: I see.
I think that would be worse. What if someone gets close enough to see me the way I see myself?
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What if they discover that underneath all the opinions and jokes and observations and carefully constructed little pieces of personality, there is just a stupid piece of shit trying very hard not to look like a stupid piece of shit? When someone tells me about my potential, I laugh to myself. Of course they think that. They don’t see what I see when nobody is looking.
Unlike my heroes, I’m not secretly exceptional. I’m not a misunderstood genius. What if I have simply been giving myself too much credit?
And worse, what if I have been right about myself all along?
There is something almost comforting about being the one who insults yourself first. If I point out every flaw before anyone else can, then nobody can surprise me. Perhaps that is what I have mistaken for self-awareness.
I call it criticism because criticism sounds useful. Productive. Intelligent, even. A good critic notices things other people miss. A good critic is difficult to fool.
But a critic is supposed to be interested in the truth. I am not always interested in the truth. I examine myself because I want to find something wrong. And once you start looking for something wrong, you can always find it.
A badly phrased sentence.
A line that could’ve been skipped.
A day that wasn’t productive enough.
A face that looked strange in a photograph.
Crooked teeth, weird smile, and that stupid posture.
Maybe that is why the question at the table bothered me more than it should have.
“What is your biggest fear?”
I gave them the dark because the dark was easy.
The dark does not know anything about me. It cannot look at me and decide that I am disappointing. It cannot compare the person I am to the person I pretend to be. It cannot notice that I have spent all this time pretending to be more certain, more intelligent, more put-together than I really am.
Now the question of the hour.
“What is my biggest fear?”
My biggest fear is that people will see me the way I see myself, without the benefit of distance or mystery or imagination, and find out that there is nothing there worth seeing.
I realise it’s a rather pathetic thing to be afraid of. But then again, I suppose that is what makes it a fear.
