Everybody has fear. It doesn’t matter how young or how old you are. You are still at a point in your life where you can experience fear. We experience fear as early as infancy. When we are babies, we cling to our parents when we see people we don't know. As we grow up into kids, we experience a fear of things that aren’t real like monsters under the bed, or ghosts hiding in our closet. In our teens, our fears are more realistic ones, like fear of being a social outcast, fear of the future, fear of tests, and many more. For adults — don't think that they don’t have fear; they do. Just because they are older doesn’t mean anything. They have a lot more to fear than that of a child or a teenager. To begin with, they have a fear of losing their job, failure, fear of commitment, and fear for their own children. This is just a few, since there are many others. Society and the media has not helped us with this situation. If anything, they have expanded our fears with horror movies and special effects.

Fear has the power to take control of you and make you question yourself and things you know are true. It can make you do less than what you are capable of and make you afraid of challenging yourself in any way. It makes you want to give up, stop taking risks, and stop sticking up for yourself. Yes, fear is powerful — I know this lesson all too well. I know first-hand of how much fear can control you. Going to high school really showed me that. From auditioning for a school play to experiencing the fear of failing a test, fear is everywhere you turn. For me, the fear of being alone took control of me so much that I almost forgot who I was. I was so scared of being a social outcast that I was willing to become anything people wanted me to be, all just so they would let me into their group. That’s what I'm talking about — because of fear, I ended up hurting myself because I wasn’t living life to the fullest. I only realized a couple of years ago that you can’t let fear control you. Don’t let the fear of loneliness convert you into an insecure and indecisive person.

Sometimes, you may not make friends right away. That's alright, because friendships take time to make...at least the good ones do, so be patient. Find the kind of friends who will have your back. You will soon learn that most of the time, anticipation and assumption is the greatest fear. In your mind, you may build up the worst thing ever, and play it over and over again until there is no doubt that you are DOOMED. The best advice I can give to all of you about being scared is to just go out and face it. It’s simple, but true. If you never face your fears or learn to live with them, then it will end up controlling you.