Korean/한국어: 다시 찾은 두려움
What happens when your love and sense of urgency overpower your fear of judgment?
Those moments when you realize that you can rise above the fear—even if intermittent—are like the crisp sound of a ball making contact with a baseball bat with undeniable certainty.1
We are all scared little kids trying to feel safe and belong. It’s easy to lose yourself in the cold hard world out there when all you’ve got is your raw will to survive and whatever box of chocolates life has in store for you (and for each and every one of us). I sought out and clung for dear life to stories about myself and the world that made me feel like I belonged, but not safe.
Oh, and it took me awhile to realize and then acknowledge that this sacred sense of “belonging” was a convenient fiction held together by self-replicating systems and ideas with an endless supply of people like me propping it up through ignorance, willful or not.
I learned through painful lived experience that you cannot buy or click your way into genuine belonging or safety. The answer to your pain isn’t out there. No algorithm-curated avatar can ever capture the complexity of who you are.
And as for people— easy come, easy go. The ones who are meant to stay, do. The ones who aren’t, don’t. And that’s okay. Life is not a race or a courtroom. Let’s turn the volume down a bit on our egos, when we can.
postscript
Note to self and humanity: fear is the mind killer.
- Shoutout to two of my biggest literary influences Haruki Murakami and Ocean Vuong for that visual metaphor. From “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” and “Wood Working at the End of the World”, respectively. ↩︎