Pain and Fear and Fear and Pain

I find it fascinating that as I read through so many vignette projects, so very many of them focused on fear. It might be because we’re all a group of angsty teenagers, or it might be indicative of how scary the world actually is, something we as a race seem to have forgotten. I am to blame in this trend as well, many of my own vignettes focused on some of the scariest and/or worst times of my life. Which brings me to another possibility, that so many of these stories are about fear because we remember fear the clearest. Heading back to my intended topic, I found three projects that really show this trend. Vic's Post was my first find, actually titled “Avoiding Fears”. Aakash’s project came next, the vignette Nepal in Crisis standing out the most. And both were followed by Eric’s post, again with tiles such as “Fear” and “Confusion”.

Vic’s fist vignette, titled “Tall Wood”, talks about waiting for his mom in a parking lot surrounded by trees when he was younger. Any littler kid will tell you that waiting, by themselves, outside while a parent runs an errand is extremely unnerving and a bit scary.

“Whenever I felt like panicking, I stared at the trees and took deep breaths...The thought of mom coming back was carved onto the bark of the tree.”

Here he talks about coming close to full blown panic, but in the end being saved by a tree, something he never considered to be anything special before. In the end, he learns from the tree, he learns to be less afraid in a situation most younger children would freak out in, he also learns that some things aren’t what you first make of them, they can surprise you.

Aakash’s blog talks about his time in Nepal, before coming to America. Or, more specifically, the time when Nepal was in the thralls of civil war. Of course, Aakash is scared, but not so much for himself as for his Aunt, whom was like a mother to him.

“There was tension in the air, we could just feel it. We later found out that a person was shot... I was just happy that my aunt was not hurt”

Aakash seems to focus less on the fact that someone unknown to him was just killed, and more on the fact that his Aunt was unhurt. I’m not saying that he should have been less happy to see his Aunt unharmed, but it is an interesting response to a high-stress situation.