The dark corners of heart

"She is a carefree. She is headstrong. She is successful. She is always full of life and cackle. She cannot possibly be scared of anything."

I know, the first thing you might have gotten uncomfortable with is my gender bias. Well, yes I would be biased here, not because of any ulterior motive but simply because I want to talk about my fellow gender, because much of the urge to talk about our fears stemmed from a conversation I had with one of my juniors at B- School, while we were driven back to the hostel from an outbound team building exercise. We were having a rather usual "getting to know each other" type of conversation, when we bumped into my desire of experiencing a deliberate failure.

Okay..!! A quick recap. I had recently taken this resolution to try pushing myself to experiencing those situations, the thoughts of which dread me to death. Failure, being one of them - I deliberately brought myself to such a situation. Yes, it was a relatively easy one and the stakes were not very high, however, I hope  it would serve my purpose.

Now, getting back to where I was. As I spoke about my seemingly crazy idea, I found her more and more intrigued. The subsequent change that I observed,  was her increasing level of comfort and her mounting confidence to bare the darkest corners of her heart in front of me, fearlessly - she had gone past her fears of being judged, misunderstood or being made fun of ! We spoke about numerous things, but what lingered in my thoughts was the openness with which she shared herself with me.

Almost all of us have a flair of judging people - positively or negatively, but we do form an opinion about everyone we cross roads with. I started speaking about a girl and I am sure we would have already humanized her in our mental space.

The girl in the picture above, I don't know, who she is but she fits into my description of the girl according to Google and may be quite a few of us.  From the picture we may perceive she is fearlessly confident. Is that really true, is she really not scared of anything or does she pretend not to be scared? 

The second assumption to me, seems more plausible. All of us I am sure are scared of something, the elements of fear may be very unique to us; our fears might not visit us every moment but they do choke us down, make us struggle for that gasp of breath in those lone moments sometimes. Many among us are alive, because they cannot die - apart from their physical self they possibly do not have anything earthly to hang on to; they too are scared, afraid of having to confront failure or loss all over again.We might be engulfed in our fears, but nothing provides more peace and calm than, daring our fears and finally winning over them.

Over the years,I have had the opportunity to share the stories of a bunch of women, at various stages of their lives. What I realized every time was - no matter how open she might come across to be, those dark corners still exist, those are lit only when someone dares to hold the torch, cares to listen and share theirs...!