FDR Was Wrong

Fear is a persnickety thing.

It can send you running into the wind, limbs flailing and screaming for all the world to hear or it can stun you silent, your screams only heard as they echo soundlessly inside the callous solitude that is your own mental prison.

It can be wrought seemingly from nothing. A memory that steeps from childhood that grows overtime like an ivy slowly crawling its way over the side of a brick facade home, until it's completely consumed by it. It can be from something so tragic and obvious that all the world would be sympathetic to your plight, understanding and empathetic to your whimpers and shudders as the culprit as such were brought to light.

It can be a culmination of things. Built up over and over again, a continual chain of events that has you guarded and bitter. Fear of change, the unknown, or moreover what you do know, what you have come to expect.

It is powerful, omnipotent. Invisible and consuming. Some surely unfounded, rooted deep in your psyche, haunting your every thought, move and instinct. And when they prove false, you sigh relieved...for now. As you never truly feel safe from them, as though you merely just got away with it this time, somehow. It just lay in wait.

In eats away at you at times. Decaying all you once knew of hopefulness and aspiration. Recounting time and time again when those fears, those seemingly needless worries had proved right, had come to fruition. The mild, the unsightly. From one extreme to the next.

There's no rationale. No rhyme or reason to anyone else. No need for justification. You feel justified in your own knowledge of repetition. That all that keeps happening is reason enough. To shut down, to hide. Or to scream on the inside, the outside. To know you're not crazy. That the proof is truly in the pudding.

FDR was wrong. Fear itself is not the only thing you have to fear. It's everything it comes with.