Fear is a Perception

Fear is a Perception.

I still have not had an opportunity to see It. Given the circumstances at the moment, I am not sure when I will see it. I was hoping to have seen both It and Birth of a Dragon by now, but these past few weeks have been very trying times and the weeks ahead will be equally trying. That said, I have seen Pennywise and Babadook all over Twitter and Facebook lately and have already begun to be desensitized to their images. Watching It may still be difficult, but I don’t think it will be as difficult as I thought.

One thing that has come to mind about It and The Fun House, where my actual fear of clowns began, is that both It and The Fun House were written by people who used the postmodernist technique of defamiliarization to create something frightening and abnormal about something quite commonplace. Additionally, they took a previously innocuous character, a clown, and made it scary. The fear of clowns is not real. Clowns are not inherently bad. People who dress up as clowns and do bad things are bad. They could dress up as anything and still be bad. Larry Block and Stephen King are responsible for at least my fear of clowns, and probably most other people’s fear of clowns. The other side of this fear relates to the same thing that causes us to be afraid of Santa Claus when we’re babies. Santa Claus, like clowns, do not look like anything we are familiar with as babies, so we are afraid of the unfamiliar.

Fear is a very valid emotion. It has its place in our lives. It can keep us safe from harm. Fear can also keep us from living our best life, especially if our fear is tied to something that is erroneous and ridiculous to be afraid of. The fear of clowns is based on a perception that they are bad or scary, but the only thing that makes them bad or scary is authors like Stephen King writing them as scary, or inherently bad people dressed up as clowns. Clowns themselves are not scary. If we can reduce each of our fears down to the perception that is tied to that fear, we can take away the power of that object or that fear.