From Fear To Fascination

by Glemir P. Sordilla
Bacolod City

The concept of fear has since plagued the human mind of its existence. How come something has the ability to make you tremble and make you feel dread? To explain fear is complicated it is the uneasiness or the feeling that something bad is about to happen.

I stumbled upon, back then, a forty-minute documentary titled, “What Is The Scariest Thing?” This video, basically, talked about fear on a scientific level and human’s fascination with discovering what is something that we, universally, are scared of.

The little part in our brain called the amygdala is the answer to my interest in why we feel terror. The fascination does not end there though because there are rare people who don’t have an amygdala or have a damaged one. When they were observed and experimented, the scientists came to the conclusion that with or without the amygdala, we all fear death.

It explains that whatever your fear is, may it be, heights or snakes, it is deeply rooted in your instinct of surviving because these fears act as a threat to your survival.

Looking at myself and remembering fears that span from the typical fear of clowns to my bizarre fear of motorcycle exhaust. It’s also a good comfort that no matter how absurd your fear is, there is someone in the world who shares the same fear as you. “I’m raised on horror movies like Nightmare On The Elm Street, Candyman but I was more scared of public humiliation,” is a funny remark from a famous drag queen, Katya Zamolodchikova, that is stuck in my brain because it is so relatable and real.

I get that humans’ fear can be boiled down to fear of death but our fears are also as complex as ourselves. It tells the tales of our experiences and failures. It embodies our desire of overcoming something. The more we try to understand ourselves the more complicated it gets. Fear is something interesting to me because I like being scared, I rarely get scared. Back then, I have a fear of sleeping because of my sleep paralysis but now, those nightmares are something that I am looking forward to. My terrors turned into something I want to experience and my fears turned into fascination and I am pretty sure I am not the only one who feels this way.