I’ve come to realize there’s nothing I can do about fear. Or at least, nothing I can do about its existence.
From the fears you can easily name (fear of the dark, fear of spiders, fear of falling) to the ones you only learn through experience (fear of rejection, fear of public embarrassment, fear of disappointing others, fear of being lost), fear is everywhere.
It doesn’t really go away. It just changes shape.
Nothing dramatic led me to this realization, really. It actually came from a pretty mundane conversation with my partner.
A Casual Goodbye
It was a normal Saturday. We’d just spent time cooking and enjoying lunch together. The conversation happened as he was getting ready to leave. I asked him to update me once he got to where he was going, adding that there’d been a lot of accidents lately. He said sure, like he always does, then shrugged and added, “Well, there’s never really a time without accidents anyway.”
We said our goodbyes after his casual quip. But his comment stuck with me. It got me thinking about how little control we actually have over what happens. How I don’t know what could happen as he travels. How he might change his route home and encounter a rushing motorist. How I can’t be there to rush to his side if something bad does happen.
This then made me ask, “Why all the negative thoughts?” which led me to thinking about fear, and how there’s really no escaping it.
I was afraid of something completely out of my control. I’d been dealing with fear this whole time, just not in the way I expected.
Not in an act of defiance, like a kid choosing to stand in a dark room while imagining the monsters lurking in the corners. Or choosing to skydive despite going pale the second you see the height of the jump. I always thought that was how you deal with fear. Facing it head on despite the shaking, the nerves, the pit in your stomach. I called that courage.
I sat with that thought for a while, and realized I actually had fears I never even recognized as fears. Not the loud kind, the ones that made my palms sweat or my heart tighten. These were quieter. The kind that don’t announce themselves, they just quietly decide things for you long before you notice. A fear that doesn’t look like fear at all. It looks like a habit, a preference, a “that’s just how I am.”
I realized that one of those quiet fears was the fear of taking risks.
Reassessing Fear
I’ve always seen myself as impulsive, a go-getter type, so I assumed I didn’t fear risk. I was always trying new things. But what I didn’t see was that somewhere underneath that, I was scared of “moving the water.” I’ve always tried things that were suggested by peers, family, or other people. I’ve never really tried something that only I, in my own social circle, found interesting.
For example, I’ve stuck with news writing for most of my life and never really strayed far from that particular lane. I knew I was good at it, so I stuck to it. And when people around me said trying a different form of writing would be risking my career, but worth a try, I did try. I thought I did it without fear, since I was so excited to step outside my comfort zone.
It was nice. But I soon realized that entering a field I knew so little about meant I would once again write badly. Produce things that might not get the usual positive feedback I’d grown accustomed to. So I stuck to what I was told to do, instead of trying to explore and dive deeper into my own writing.
The Challenge
Sitting with all these thoughts, I was reminded of a discussion with Mag and Gary. It was a conversation about the flow of how we produce blogs and posts for our accounts. I found myself telling both of them that I was having trouble producing more blogs, since I wasn’t sure if what I was writing fit the kind of content they wanted for the website.
That’s when Mag challenged Gary and me to take more risks in the work we do. During that conversation, I thought: “But I already did take the risk.”
I figured I already had, by stepping into content work for existential therapy without really knowing what I was getting into. But it turns out, that wasn’t the risk Mag meant at all.
The real risk was somewhere quieter, somewhere I hadn’t been willing to look. It was the risk of putting something out there knowing some people just aren’t going to like it. The risk of writing without holding onto any expectation of how others will take it.
And maybe that’s the thing about fear. Existential psychology talks about this idea that anxiety isn’t a flaw to fix or a glitch to override, it’s actually built into what it means to be free.
Every time we’re faced with real choice, the choice to change direction, to try something unfamiliar, to risk failing at something that actually matters to us, fear shows up alongside it. Not because something is wrong with us, but because we’re standing at the edge of our own freedom, fully aware of everything we could lose or become.
There was a quote I came across on a poster at a bookstore when I was younger: “Courage is not living without fear, it’s living alongside it.”
Maybe fear was never something to eliminate. Maybe it’s just the feeling of being face to face with your own possibility.
So here I am, publishing this blog and letting you read it. Because this is how I’ve decided to face mine.
About the Author
Faith Yuen Wei Ragasa
Cats and books — If you asked me to sum myself up in two words, I’d happily stop there. Everything else tends to unfold through the stories I write.
I began writing as a journalist who worked as a digital producer for news organizations based in the Philippines, including the now-closed CNN franchise in the country.
As I step beyond the newsroom and attempt freelancing, I’m giving myself room to learn, try new things, and keep discovering new stories and other ways of telling them.
