I've always been an anxious person. Recently, though, it's become more of a daily task to relax and quiet my mind. It takes a lot for me to feel calm and collected throughout my daily life. I've done my best, however, to not let this minor setback keep me from doing what I love!
This weekend, my sister and I attended the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park. We spent some much-needed bonding time navigating our way through the city, enjoying our favorite artists perform live, and unexpectedly, surviving what we thought was a near death experience.
As we stood among the mass of people awaiting the iconic Janet Jackson to take the stage, a stampede of people covered with expressions of pure fear and horror fled to the exit. I felt a rush of panic flood through my body and every hair on the back of my neck stood. I could feel my sister's terror as we locked hands and blended into the frightened crowd.
You can only think the worst at a time like this. Or maybe, we have been trained to think the worst. I mean, it was almost exactly a year to the date that the Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in America, occurred. I was paralyzed with fear, bracing myself to see a gunman walking towards my sister and I as we dove for shelter under a table, along with a mother and her daughter. I remember desperately trying to convince my sister, and honestly, convince myself as well, that everything was going to be fine.
And ... everything was fine. There were no shots fired in Central Park on September 29, 2018. Nobody was killed. But I promise you, people were mentally scarred. Feeling like I was going to have to call my family for the last time was gut-wrenching. Knowing I was in charge of my sister's life was heart-aching.
The Global Citizen Festival continued that night, with Janet Jackson resuming her performance followed by the Weeknd ... after the "confusion" was resolved, of course. Originally, the panic was thought to have stemmed from a fallen security barrier, creating a noise resembling gunshots. On Sunday, however, Hugh Evans issued a statement on behalf of the Global Citizen Festival explaining that the terror-oriented noise came from "an attendee(s) stepping on and popping a drink bottle(s)."
This to me just shows what a somber state our society is in. 60,000 people were literally standing up for global issues on Saturday, and ironically, one of the biggest and most concerning issues put a detrimental pause in such an impactful event. Someone stepping on a bottle turned into thousands of people thinking their lives were at stake. I often hear the phrase "We can't live in fear," and as much as we'd all like to say that we don't ... this incident proves that fear is always present in the back of our minds. Whether this is good or bad, I truly don't know. Some might argue that being fearful allows you to take better action in these alarming situations. But nevertheless, it saddens me that these situations are continually haunting our society.
Anyway, as I said, I've always been an anxious person. And after this weekend, it'll be even more difficult to get back to the semi-anxious state I call normal. Experiencing such great emotion at such an impactful event, though, really prompted me to reflect on the global issues addressed at the festival, and also reflect on the bigger problems that went unaddressed. The speakers and performers at this festival pushed the importance of becoming a society of action. And more importantly, becoming a society of love. As cheesy as it sounds, without such basic fundamentals, we run the risk of living in fear becoming the norm.