Unfearing yourself

As a followup from my previous post!

Most white south African's are, I expect, pretty afraid of being in townships. Or maybe it was just me. But I think its a pretty common fear. Its not even a well defined fear - like a fear of being mugged or stabbed or a fear of death. Fears like that are not great, but they are understandable and justifiable. No one wants to be mugged! No, this fear is a sort of fear of general badness and the unknown. But that was particularly ineloquent, I know, perhaps someone else will be able to express it better.

Anyway, the first time a friend dropped me in the township near us to do extra math with some matric students I said I would be fine... "ja ja I'll be fine, see you later." But on the inside there was a terrified "AAAAARG!!!"
Especially when we realised the school I was dropped at (my lift having left) was closed, so we had to walk to a nearby library.

It was pretty ridiculous, in retrospect, but I was pretty scared.

Anyway, I've got over that fear now. This is roughly my technique for dealing with this kind of fear:

1) Evaluate, as best you can, if the danger is real.
If the danger is real, then leave!!
This is often a difficult thing to evaluate though, because when you are nervous and in a place you aren't used to, and feeling very conspicuous, and very aware of the newspaper article you read last week about someone being beaten to death with a spade... well, its sometimes hard to be objective.
Also sometimes you just don't have the information you need to make an informed decision - sometimes I really just don't know if an area is safe or not. And its easy to give in to prejudices (for example, that poorer areas are automatically unsafe. Which is not necessarily the case).
So it might be a good idea to ask people who are more in the know than you.

2) If you decide that the danger is not real, teach yourself not to be afraid.
So in my case, having decided that hanging around the front of a high school in the township waiting for kids to arrive for extra math is not dangerous, what then? Even if I objectively decide its not dangerous, what if I still get a fright every time someone walks past, heart beating fast, thinking people are looking at me and so on?
Well, then you train yourself to not be scared.
So for me, this means parking my car and resisting the urge to keep it locked and wait for the kids inside my locked car. It means unlocking the door, opening it and sitting on the pavement. It means greeting people.
And after a while your brain will realise that the impending danger is not so impending.

Ah!! But what about desensitising yourself to dangerous situations? Couldn't that happen if you act like this?
And that is a hazard. Which is why you do need to assess situations for danger. And be careful, be alert, don't be in lonely places on your own and so forth. You don't even need to be afraid to be alert and careful.

And as you realise you don't always have to be afraid, your world will get bigger.

My brother and I used to play a computer game called Civilization, where you explored an unknown land and settled and built up a nation. The game was played on a map (sometimes of the Earth, but you could play in a fantasy world too), which showed the landscape and your cities and people and your opponent's cities and people. But the places you had never travelled to with any of your men were dark, just blanked out on the map. You didn't know what was happening there, if any opponents had settled there, or even what the landscape there was like if it was a fantasy map.

So as well as building up cities and so forth, a big part of the game was sending out your men to explore. And as you explored, as you went new places, you would see what was happening there. Other cities you could trade with (or destroy, it was quite a millitant game!), natural resources you could tap in to, good land to settle on.

And your map of the world became more and more open. And the blanked out sections became smaller and smaller.

And thats what letting go of fear can do for you. The blanked out sections of your world (geographic and otherwise) will become smaller and smaller.