I was reading something the other day that asked, “What is your greatest fear?” And the thought which immediately occurred to me was, “Dying unloved.” I immediately discounted it as a weird and ridiculous thought but as more questions came thick and fast, the thought stayed with me.
What do you do because you’re fearful, what does your fear create, what proves your fear is misguided, what can you do to overcome it?
It came to me—as I was reading these questions and as answers kept popping unbidden into my head—was that most of us do when we’re fearful of such a thing is an act known as self-fulfilling prophesy. We step back from life, from friends, from family. We create the exact situation of which we’re fearful by pulling away from the ones we love and becoming introspective and overprotective of our emotions. What proves the fear is misguided? The love of family and friends. And what can you do to overcome the fear? Keep the communication channels open. Keep loving the people you love. Stay accessible. Love even more people than you do now. Help other folk. Be there for the ones you care about.
Now I suppose you could say this fear is grounded in possibility. There’s every possibility that I could die unloved. I could live to be 120 and have no friends or family left. A natural disaster could wipe out the world and just leave me in it alone. But the scenarios have to be pretty scary for my inner fear to transpose itself into real life.
So I suppose the fear behind the two-word thought is the uncomfortable feeling that you might not be loved by enough people. Or perhaps that you might not be loved enough by certain people. And that’s not something you can fix by making other people change. All you can do about it is to show more love yourself. That means being more present, more demonstrative, more thoughtful and just … more of everything good and kind and lovely.
Nothing wrong with aiming for that.
