The Beauty of Fear

Our guest blogger is JeanNicole Rivers who has appeared before on Digital Book Today. She is the author of Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers.

The Beauty of Fear

Last week one of my FB friends posted a comment about no longer fearing not being loved and it touched a chord within me considering this particular fear is one of the concepts that I explore in my new novel, Unwanted (October 1, 2013).
Too much of any one thing is a bad thing, but fear is not an emotion of which anyone should want to completely rid themselves. Fear is beautiful and necessary.
I absolutely adore the horror/thriller genre as many people do, which is why it is so popular. Recently, a friend noticed the horror book I was reading and after she cringed she asked why in the world I would want to read a book that would scare me out of my wits. I thought about it and replied, honestly, that there is comfort in the emotion of fear.
Fear is an intrinsic and powerful mechanism built into the human design to keep us safe. People often associate the horror/thriller genre with bad things, demons, devils, ghosts, but it is more than that for me, it is an outlet to embrace my most fundamental fears, to expose them so that they no longer have power over me. The genre of horror at its best is not about making one jump at every strange noise or creepy shadow that one encounters, it is about learning what we as human beings fear most so that we can find ways to manage and cope with those fears, despite the fact that we may never be completely rid of them.
Fear makes us wise, humble vulnerable, it lets us know that we are not always in control and that lack of control is sometimes just part of the way the world works and something that we must accept. Fear makes us human and once we lose that fear we are no longer human, we become one of two things, monstrous or divine.
“Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.”
~Mary Ferguson
JeanNicole Rivers @JeanNicole19