I was too scared of all the lows that I missed the highs …
Cherophobia is the fear of happiness. The sinking feeling you get in your chest everytime you’re happy. Especially when you remember that happiness is fickle and something will come soon to take it away. This fear makes it unable for you to truly appreciate all of the good things happening in your life. Because it’s easier to be sad than to be happy if sadness is all you’ve ever known.
Mental Health in Nigeria is quite expensive and, honestly speaking, it’s easier to be depressed and sad than to get your ass up and try to fix your life. It’s easier to give up; to not try. And for a long time, most of us do not try. We compartmentalize. We train our minds to not dwell on events that hurt. We cover everything up with humor and wish it away.
I was too scared of all the lows that I missed the highs…
The easiest thing to do in life is to decide, after you’ve been heartbroken once, to not love again. The regular excuse is “I don’t want to be heartbroken anymore.” “I don’t ever want to be that vulnerable again.” “Loving someone is giving them the power to hurt you again and again.”
Of course, all these are valid reasons. No one wants to get hurt. At least, I don’t want to get hurt. But we are all so scared of being heartbroken that we forget love is a beautiful thing, too. We are too scared of what might happen that we forget to enjoy what is happening.
A friend proposed a theory of present, past and future. He said one minute ago is the past and one minute from now is the future. Therefore, our present is the split second (read as nanosecond) between one minute ago and one minute later. If this is so, we have no control over what happened to us as much as we have little control over what will happen to us.
So while it is safe to stay in the familiar territory of the “lows,” it is also not the best way to live. No life is truly lived if we play safe and shy away from experiencing all of it’s bitter-sweetness.
In How Poetry Can Change Your Heart, Andrea Gibson suggests that you go out of your way to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. To experience things. To let yourself go. Life is too fickle for us to be hard on ourselves all the time.
I’ll leave you with this question: Is it better to be safe than to have lived?
