September Blog Post

Fallon Falore

Christina Ivey

COMM 160

1 October 2018

“The Most Important Sentence”

The most meaningful sentence that I want to focus on for my blog post this month is the idea of identity and perception. In class, Professor Ivey pointed out the valid point that it “is easy to miss something you’re not looking for.” Everyday there are certain things that we miss because our perception doesn’t focus on those specific ideas. In order to grow your perception —how a person sees the world, as influenced by social, political, and cultural experiences that shape who they are— you have to be open to new perspectives, cultures and ideas of those around you. A lot of times we miss opportunities to learn something new because of the fear that we have within us. There can be numerous other reasons why we missed that certain thing but if we are too afraid to approach situations due to the fear associated with it then we are more likely miss something that we are not looking for. However, after reading chapter 2 of Andreas Gomez’s book, Fear: Beneath the Facade, and connecting it to some of my other classes I began to realize a lot about life. There is no time for being afraid, it really just stops us from finding those little things that can turn out to be what we are most passionate about. People perceive fear with a negative connotation and a lot of times that is what makes people step away from things connected to it. However, if we use fear in a way that emphasizes transforming uncertainty to become something great then we most likely wouldn’t be missing those little instances that make life so great. Fear is a powerful primary emotion that drives people to do nasty things, but if we use it like Gomez and challenge fear to overcome our biggest obstacles, we could be doing the extraordinary.

In my life I believe that fear is the reason I am missing something that I am not looking for. Fear stops me from going out and meeting new people. It also stops me from being myself in social settings because I am scared of what people might think. In those moments of fear, I am only thinking about myself, which doesn’t allow me to see the world through others perspectives. My perception alone can be the reason that I miss the small things because you need various perspectives to be able to understand new ones. Although this has been hard for me to change, I believe that anyone can do it with the right amount of motivation to change. Change alone can be fearful to many, but it is important to change because using that fear to make the change could bring so many positive outcomes to the world. At the end of Gomez’s chapter he writes, “Fear, ultimately, is the reason I survived,” and that alone shows that it is possible to change our perspective in order to live a better life and be able to see the world in a new way due to new experiences that we might have missed before.