face your fears
Happy Monday! I hope you had a fantastic, fun weekend! Prior to Friday’s video recap, I wrote two posts on knowing what to look for and expanding your palate. Today’s post follows an exhilarating weekend of improv shows, improv class, and an adventure with friends at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am a huge scaredy-cat. I scare easily, so it was a surprise to pretty much everyone involved that I agreed to go to the Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios on Saturday night. It was not my usual scene, but I really did have fun.
Halloween Horror Nights is a festival of horrors. There are mazes themed after different horror movies and shows, different kinds of spooky merchandise for sale, and areas called “scare zones” where creepy and horridly-costumed characters do their best to scare you! My friends and I started out doing a few mazes, including ones based on “The Shining,” “American Horror Story: Roanoke,” and “Ash vs. the Evil Dead.” Of the first three, I was sure I would be the most scared of AHS: Roanoke, being that the series on FX scared the bejeezus out of me. I’m from a small town in the Pine Barrens and remember profusely texting my best friend about how I was too afraid to watch it (she was, too!). In reality, however, the maze that scared me the most of the first three was the one based on “Ash vs. the Evil Dead.” If it weren’t for my friends, I would’ve completely frozen as I was surrounded by spooky characters that kept popping out at me. I admit it - first, I tried to run backwards away from the characters, which led me into other scary characters, and then I cried.
Following that maze, we also went through our first “Scare Zone.” This was a more spacious walk-through where characters openly walked around to scare visitors. In this walk-through scenario, a person on stilts towered over me, and I immediately dropped to the ground in a version of the fetal position. One of my friends had to come physically move me forward. It’s funny in retrospect, thinking about how paralyzed I was by these very imaginative, scary characters and mazes, walking through each with my ears plugged, but of course I came away with a lesson.
Scary things happen. Sometimes your instinct will be to fight; sometimes your instinct will be to run; and sometimes you’ll freeze up. I knew going into the night that I was going to be scared, but I didn’t always know how I would react. Sometimes I ran backwards, which pushed me into more scary characters. Sometimes I yelled “no” at the characters, which helped me laugh at them and take their power away. And sometimes I froze up, paralyzed. Those times that I froze or collapsed to the ground, my friends were there to push me forward away from the danger.
No matter what happens to you in life, it’s important to react the best way you know how to at the time. Face your fears, and in the times you don’t know how to react, lean on the people you trust to help you move forward. Life is about growth and forward-movement. Forgive yourself for your shortcomings, and be grateful for the friends who pull you away from danger.
Thank you so much for reading, and, as always, if you have any pressing questions or if you want to discuss something further with me, feel free to subscribe below or reach out to me on the “contact” page. I’m so grateful you're here and that I’ve been getting a lot of really challenging questions and even better feedback from a community all over the world. I couldn’t do this without you! So THANK YOU! I’m here for you, and I love hearing from you, too! You’re the best, and you have everything you need inside of you! Please believe it! Starve your ego, feed your soul - and follow your heart!