Trời ơi!
There is a shy more than a month before I’m whisked off to the land of destitute (sidenote: iPhone autocorrect tried ‘designers’. I LOL-ed) and the unease in the deep crevices of my sternum is threatening to boil over.
Sometimes my friends ask “Why the fear?”
I thought about it.
And realized that there is no fear, as much as there is dread. Lots and lots of dread; enough to drown a drown a grown man. Dread and fear are arguably similar but they are intrinsically different.
When experiencing either of the two, the body responds and reacts in indistinguishable ways. Both dread and fear induce a similar state of unease, nervousness, palpitations and a full bounding pulse. There is also an intense rejection towards the source of distress. The supposedly warm fluttering butterflies in your stomach when you are in love is as to the slithering and biting snake when you are in dread, or fear.
However, despite the uncanny similarities in the bodily responses, fear and dread are fundamentally different.
Fear is instinctual, it exists because it is a mechanism for the preservation or sustenance of life. It is the recurring rejection of a source the subject has perceived to be detrimental, and will likely result in real harm or death. Fears, or phobias, of particular sources include Nyctophobia, the fear the dark and Claustrophobia, the fear of confined spaces. For example, the fear of darkness arise because the subject fears that they could be potentially hurt by whatever (if any) that lurks in the dark. Similar, claustrophobics fear that in confined spaces, they could not escape when faced with danger. The source of fear maybe not be exactly logically for others simply because fear is emotional. Fear of a matter could be acquired by past experiences or external acquisition. It does not necessarily disappear even after the subject confronts their fear (i.e locking a claustrophobic in the small closet does not help overcome the fear).
Conversely, dread is the anxiety or apprehension of a source in the future. Dread arises when the subject is compelled to face something unpleasant that is to come. Unlike fear, dread is not spontaneous nor is it fleeting. It is the worry over a given period of time until which the subject overcomes the source of distress. It concerned itself less with the possibly of death, but rather having to do what the heart and/or mind does not want to. To illustrate, a student who did not attend classes regularly might dread the science test next Tuesday. A subject might also dread a date with someone they don’t fancy. Dread is not acquired, it simply snowballs as the date draws closer and dissipates once it is conquered (I.e. Dread of science test disappears once it is over).
Putting it together: A subject who was attacked by a feral dog could have a fear of canines and dread the day their school is going to a dog farm.
To overcome fear, one has to be convinced that the source is unlikely to cause harm (perhaps, again)
To overcome dread, the subject has to decide if they could manage what can be changed, and change it, or to accept the inevitable.
