Fear is a four-letter word and a four-walled room. It is small and simple, contained and yet somehow expansive. The word rolls off your tongue easier than it is experienced, and the sound it makes still feels sharper than the act of pressing our teeth into our lip to will its noise.

Like a four-letter word and a four-walled room, fear is ordinary; we expect it. So much so that we may take notice when the contrary is presented to us. We might say this room has a lot of walls or too few; its shape is odd or interesting. Our word is long, and the syllables are maybe stretched or doubled or even quintupled. Maybe our tongue ties as we attempt to speak it.

Though it is most certainly a four-letter word in the English language, it may be worth my while to defend the accusation of fear also being a four-walled room. Like all words, it is obviously not actually a room, but the word fear has meaning, and that meaning is our sense of threat and the emotion of perceiving the potential for pain. We’re talking about abstractions, so what better way to explain my thoughts than to use a metaphor?

A room, like a feeling, is inhabited. Thanks to the limitations of our biology, we are keen to have emotions arrive all the time, even the unpleasant ones like fear. We live in and perceive the world through our feelings. Like a room, they take up real estate, they are spacious and hold the potential to be explored. We can, in an abstract sort of way, use our senses to comprehend a feeling like fear. We can ask ourselves how it feels to be afraid.

The benefit of exploring a feeling is much like any pursuit of knowledge, and that is increasing perceptibility, reducing the strength of the reactivity of emotion, stronger literacy (in this case, emotional literacy) and self-understanding. It also makes us more forgiving for having feelings at all.

I’ve been reflecting on fear because it is not a question for me that it has long been one of my greatest inhibitors, and I am not alone in this. We are incredibly afraid, all of us, though the subjects of our fears likely have some variance.

When I think of fear and overcoming it, I think of the path to bravery as some sort of clear-cut surge of courage that overrides our fear. But as I’ve been sitting here, reflecting on my life and the moments when this sort of sudden onset of bravery would have been awfully useful, I think that these occurrences or miraculous appearances have been less often than another type of overcoming fear; this is being tired of fear.

There is a reason that I think being fearful grows tiresome, especially as you grow older and develop life experience. Like an ordinary four-walled room, fear has its structure, but it also has a variety of materials with which it is filled. Assuming the room itself introduces no sudden changes, no new furniture or renovations, after some time, you could probably get a good sense of what’s in the room. If you spent a lot of time in this space, perhaps you get there sooner than others, growing bored of the same books or chipped paint.

This is to say that I have spent many years sitting in fear, knocking on its doors, which may or may not open to expand the space a little more. I’ve walked inside, pacing from every angle. I’ve checked behind the curtains, redecorated, and organized. But without changes, the room runs out of novelty, and I grow impatient and bored rather quickly.

So, the cabin fever ensues and you begin to not only grow tired of the room but of the fantasy of leaving it. It is more exhausting to dream of the same thing every day than to pursue the dream itself. It becomes easier to walk out of the room than to stay in it; it becomes more attractive to take the risk of an unknown room than to remain comfortable.

You see, there was nothing new this room could teach me. Our relationships to our feelings are much like those with these rooms; fear was not telling me any new stories. After viewing the room from every possible angle, the shifts in perspective became less interesting.

Like listening to a storyteller, I started to hear the part of its narration that it preferred, the kind where the more the story is told, the more it is embellished. Fear has played a game of telephone through the memory of the last time it was told. This is to say it got old; those words, that feeling.

So if fear is a room, perhaps it is not just the miracle of a sudden shift in our sense of threat but also in the change of our interests. Perhaps it is that our expectation of pain is overpowered by the familiarity of the feeling, and that it, too, is not worth sticking around for.

This is not to say that fear is unreasonable or useless or that it can be removed from our lives entirely. But it is to say that often, as we get older, it is made obvious to us that our unconscious and self-limiting fears come from only a select few narrations, and they are painfully uncreative.

So the room and ourselves must change, and we can do so slowly or all at once. We can make it more comfortable, change the flow of the space so it is not so easy to get stuck in the stories it has always told. We can introduce ourselves to new rooms, new sensations or experiences that tell us there is more than what this room has to offer.

There is a whole world out there, outside of this familiar room. Grow bored, as bored as you can, as quickly as you feel necessary. Be more inventive than the room, allow its shape to reveal the skeleton of your worries and count them, each rib, each remaining belief that holds you back.

Fear is unimaginative. Joy, potential, curiosity, these are the endless pursuits that never grow old. They are boundless; not held together so simply. There is no need to be heroic, only exploratory.

Change the room, leave the room, do what you need to do to understand it before you go. Come back for a while, like visiting your childhood home, a place of memory and infancy in the great expansive cosmos. Be held by the room, then grow into boredom; fear is no match for curiosity, the unknown awaits, fear is what you already know.