What is your biggest fear?

Jess Semaan
3 min readMar 8, 2017
Photo by Ellie Wildhagen

…a reader asked me. Instead of writing a quick response, I took the time to reflect, not without some fear.

First I dumped. I wrote down a list of my fears.

1- To suffer from terminal illness

2- To fail in love

3- To lose my mother

4- To produce unoriginal work

5- To have no friends

6- To have a boring life

7- To live through war / conflict again

8- To mess up hypothetical children

9- To lose my physical strength

10- To get old, and risk not being attractive

Second, I inquired. What is at the bottom of each fear?

For every fear I asked what about it that is scary?

1- To suffer from terminal illness > being with the pain

2- To fail in love > being with the loss

3- To lose my mother > being with the pain and the loss

4- To produce unoriginal work > being with the pain of rejection

5- To have no friends > being with the shame and the loss

6- To have a boring life > being with the pain

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