Fear Is An Addiction

This was sent in by a friend who frequently travels to very bad places.

Fear is an addiction. For the select few among us - who find odd satisfaction in the looks we get when we tell others what we do - the adrenaline rush that comes from chasing danger to its extreme is, once felt, like a craving that’s impossible to satisfy. You keep looking for your next hit, searching in the world’s dark and dusty corners, places most are trying to escape.

It’s something beyond - even incomparable to - the extreme sports category of thrill-seeking: Sky-diving, bungee-jumping…mere short-term games that have more of an appearance of defying death than actual defiance. Child’s play, compared to what you’re after.

This is about a state of existence, entering a world where the rule of law, of everything-you-know, doesn’t exist. Only the rule of the gun, and the baser of man’s inclinations. It’s like being in a parallel universe, so far from everything you find familiar, where you hang in limbo, not knowing what will happen this minute…or the next.

Nothing is like the first time. All your senses are completely alive - you can feel each strand of hair as it connects to your head, you skin as it wraps around your muscles, your blood as it races through your veins. Your brain goes into overdrive as you process what you see, hear, and feel faster than you ever thought possible. It’s an intensity unmatched by anything and yet you remain completely calm. On the outside, at least. Inside, your heart is racing, and you wonder if anyone can see it pounding in your chest. You almost don’t recognize yourself.

It’s the very definition of exhilaration. You don’t sleep. But you don’t need to.

Nothing is like the first time. You keep hoping, keep looking, for that same intensity - but each successive foray becomes more and more blasé, driving you to accept greater and greater risk in a futile effort to scratch the itch. If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were on sedatives.

So you wait - then a spark of a rumor of danger will cause a ripple to shoot up your spine. But then it’s gone. Others recall harrowing tales of getting caught in the middle of militia-so-and-so and the military-of-whatever-nasty-government, and you find yourself jealous. You go on a tour of the world’s hellholes, but nothing will satisfy your craving.

You lay awake at night wondering why. You are called to this work by passion, and compassion, but you can’t deny that you yearn for the thrill. You imagine what it would be like to be caught in a coup, to be arrested - only if you emerge unscathed, of course, and can nonchalantly recount tales of bravery and heroics to captive audiences back home.

“I survived a rebel attack and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” No biggie, all in a day’s work, in your best trying-not-sound-boastful-while-boasting voice.

What is it that drives us to this edge? Are we crazy, or just the only ones honest enough to admit it? What do all of the stories, and perhaps occasional scars, add up to in the end? A feeling of superiority? Of separation? That we somehow exist apart from the masses of AverageJoe McNormalLifes?

And what does that get us?

And yet here I am, and there you are - running down a path to the unknown, desperately searching for an experience that is extraordinary, to feel alive by playing hide-and-seek with death. Anything to break the boredom.

[Photo from zoriah.com]