The other day I was shopping at the local 'Gabes,' when I saw a little shirt with the Cookie Monster (from Sesame Street) on it. It started with the Cookie Monster. Remember him? Remember how he used to make you laugh and giggle with his gravelly voice and loopy eyes? Remember how he used to make you feel happy because he always wanted to be hugged and loved? Well I’m sorry to tell you, but it was all a lie. The Cookie Monster was NOT your friend. The Cookie Monster was no one’s friend; in fact he was quite possibly the smartest criminal in the history of mankind. Want to know why? Because he fooled every single child on the face of the planet into thinking that they were safe around him. Every single child that is, except me. I knew the truth. In my five-year-old brain nothing was scarier than seeing that hulking, googly-eyed, cookie gobbling fiend, but everyone else in the world seemed to think he was so… friendly. While everyone else thought he was so cuddly and cute and funny and blue, I knew that he was secretly planning to change his diet from cookies to human flesh. That’s right, you heard me. The Cookie Monster was really a homicidal maniac who was plotting the grisly demise of the entire human race, and his first victim was going to be a skinny five-year-old brunette girl from Nowheresville, Pennsylvania. Me. I was so terrified of that mass murdering fiend that I would make my mother leave a plate of cookies outside my bedroom door every night so that he would eat them and be too full to eat me. I wish I could say that my fear dissipated as I grew older but it didn’t, it merely changed. As I grew older I became terrified of going blind and deaf. It got so bad that I used to wake up in the middle of the night yelling for my mother because I was afraid that the world was going dark and dim and I would be left alone in silence... Now that I’m nearing my twenties I should be able to look back on my life and say that I’ve accomplished things that I’m proud of, but I’m finding that I’m too scared to go after what I want. I’m scared of never making something of myself and I’m scared of trying to make something of myself; I’m terrified of staying in this depressing little rut that I’ve gotten myself into, and I’m terrified of trying to break out of it. I know my fear is completely irrational but I can’t seem to stop it, and now it seems that I’m afraid that my fear is going to run my life. It’s a strange thing to be afraid of fear. So why do we do it? Why do we let our fears get so out of hand that we stop ourselves from living life? Why do allow ourselves to think that life is something to be afraid of, when we should see it as an adventure? Why do we throw stones when our path is clear? I for one am sick and tired of facing each day thinking that some unknown catastrophe is going to suck the life out of me, not when I haven’t even begun to live it. I know that it’s a cliché, but we really should do one thing each day that scares us, and I am starting today. Today I’m telling the world my fears. I’m putting my fears front and center for the world to see in the hopes that I can then put them on the back burner for a while. The Cookie Monster thing? Well, I’ll tackle one fear at a time. It's time to scratch out FEAR!