RSF Portfolio Walk -
Subject’s fears in the same sequence as prints on the table. 





Palynn
I am terrified that my genetics will someday be my future. Afraid of the voices in my head or that those bits of paranoia aren't acceptable and in fact the result of a disorder. My grandmother was schizophrenic and killed herself when I was six months old. I've lived with her shadow. My dad always warning "that stuff skips a generation,” and it's terrified me since childhood as I've struggled through my own bouts of mental health issues.




Michael
I'm afraid of never being loved or cared for.




Janine
I’m afraid my baby will die. I’ll be holding her in my arms and she’ll be breathing and I’ll feel the rapture and the relief of okay, we’ve got her now, safe and sound, but then she slips away from us anyway and there’s nothing we can do to bring her back. After all the love and hope and good intention we poured into bringing her to life, she just goes away. And instead of celebrating a miracle, we mourn an unspeakable tragedy.




Keriba
When my son died, I lied to myself and said he was just spending the night with a friend. I keep telling myself that lie any time I start thinking about him being gone. I’m afraid of who or what I’ll become if I ever let myself realize the truth.




Colleen
My worst fear is being abandoned, unloved and unimportant. I’m afraid I will never be good enough for anyone just as I am.






Chelsea
I wake up every morning afraid to get out of bed because I know I’m going to have to encounter others during the day. I stay inside most of the time for that reason. I’m afraid of being myself, being trans, and living with it day after day. I fear the judgement of others as I walk down the street. I fear it so intensely that the simple act of being noticed by others on the street gives me anxiety.

I fear men. All men, but particularly straight white men. This fear is more like a physical fear for my life. I actively avoid them at all costs. When I can’t avoid them, I pick fights with them. This usually makes them not want to be around me… mission accomplished. I am, however, physically attracted to them.

I fear anything that makes me cry or feel any kind of emotion other than anger. It’s become easy for me divert my fear onto a path of anger. That too scares me.





Veronica
My deepest fear is that I am insignificant; that I do not matter. There is still a little girl within me that feels neglected each time that she is rejected or pushed to the side. After moving from foster home to foster home, you internalize the idea that you will never be loved as you are. When I am spiraling, I say to myself: "No one loves me, I do not matter, no one cares about me." Instead, I am trying to ask myself, "Who loves me? Who do I matter to? What makes me important?"





Holli
I am afraid that I drive men to either die or want to murder me. Last year the guy I was supposed to move in with died of a heart attack. He was thirty-three years old. A guy I was supposed to go on a date with didn’t show up because he died of a heart attack. A guy I was having an emotional affair with died of a seizure just before I left my boyfriend for him.

I’ve had two boyfriends try to kill me. One shot at me and missed by centimeters. The bullet went through my hair. The other tried to kill me by beating me to death.

I am afraid that because of this, love is not an option and any semblance of love is only disguising a murderous or suicidal soul.




Jennifer
I fear that, at the end of my life, my body was created for nothing more than to be molested, abused, and raped. And that everything I am on the inside – all of my dreams, desires, and passion – is nothing compared to the pleasure I’ve given men that chose to steal it from me.





Justain
I am a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. I have had an issue with self injury since combat and my divorce. I don’t know if my fear is that I’m afraid to love anyone again, or if I don’t know how to live without the pain.



Sierra
I’m intensely afraid of failure, to the point of paralysis in my creative output. I’m secretly afraid I’ll never harness any of my potential. I crave connection to a community of artists, but have overwhelming thoughts of never becoming one of them.






Makayla
I’m afraid of disconnection. I tell myself I’m not ready to settle down with one person, I need variety, I’m too independent, I’m still finding myself. It’s all true, but it’s also a barrier. When I find myself getting close to truly loving someone, I end up self-sabotaging. Being vulnerable is an experience that connects us, but once we are hurt, nobody is willing to open up again, to trust completely. Relationships start to become more meaningless, surface level, or all about sex.

I fear a world full of people using each other; I fear the fact that I am one of those people. No matter my intentions or how aware I am, I disconnect and choose control over love every time.





Chris
I am a 46 year-old man that has done almost 20 years in prison. I have beat a 20-year drug addiction. I am currently homeless, living in my truck with my wife who has cancer and our pup. I secretly fear never amounting to anything that is good. I try, I really do. I do good deeds when I can, yet I always feel like a piece of shit.





Joselyn
I am afraid of my past keeping me stuck in its weighty grips forever. I'm afraid of not being able to let go and move on from years of childhood incest, neglect, and abuse. I am afraid of who I am, if I am not the abused girl filled with pain of childhood molestation from my dad. Wild as though it may be, I'm afraid of knowing what it feels like to be okay.





Philip
The thing I fear most is a relapse. I was addicted to meth and it destroyed my life. Now, I’m eight months clean and couldn't be happier. I know that if I relapse again, I will end up in prison or in a coffin.





Maria
I am afraid that my career is over. That the emails stopped coming, or the sales stopped happening, not because of the recent events in my life that kept me from working full force, but because my work isn’t truly good. That I am a one hit wonder that will soon fizzle into some not-very-present memory. I’m washed up; I’m over. My art is weak; my statements aren’t smart enough; all that I have been working for was for nothing. In the end, no one really cared. I’m afraid that devoting my life to art was all along a ridiculous idea, an illusion, and I was just a fool for pursuing it.





Adrienne
I secretly fear everything. More so now than when I was on drugs, which would generally cause more paranoia than fear. I don't know what it is, but I'm constantly worrying about making other people happy. I fear how somebody might look at me, or not look at me. I fear I might say the wrong thing. I fear being alone, but fear people so damn much. I'm scared of hurting others, because I have done so many times in my using days. I'm scared of being hurt because I have been so many times. My head doesn't stop spinning and I'm tired of hiding, literally and figuratively.








David
My fear has two prongs. A fear of abandonment showed up sometime before age five, then a fear of rejection by peers took hold and intensified.  
I have a glitchy brain that tends not to process information quickly and effectively. Compared to many whose less-impaired function enables a sense of agency and self-esteem, my psycho-physical apparatus has led me to live most of a lifetime feeling inadequate, of not measuring up. Carried in secret for the most part, it is a heavy, shame-based burden and a hideous way to feel for any length of time, let alone for most of one’s life.





Lizeth
My fear is falling back into my eating disorder – anorexia nervosa with a side of body dysmorphia. Just like a recovering or recovered alcoholic, it's something you work towards every day.

I had been going to the gym and eating healthier, then Covid-19 struck and shut down the gyms. Since I couldn't go anymore, I started restricting my food intake. I felt like I was losing control over my life and everything I was working towards, but I could still control what I ate. I considered it to be self discipline. The less I ate, the more in control I felt. When I did eat, I felt weak and unworthy, like I had lost some self-made competition against myself.

I hit a couple of “milestones” before realizing I needed to get better. First, I was scared to take off my shirt for what I saw; all ribs, including my floating ribs, and my spine all the way down to the sacrum. Second, being able to see my heart beating through my chest.

It's been the hardest thing I've ever had to overcome.






Reina
From eighteen to twenty five, I worked as an exotic dancer. At times, I felt empowered and in control of the room, but as soon as something bad happened I wanted to get out. I felt stuck in a never-ending cycle of wanting to quit the industry, but not knowing how. I had to sit back and take every racist and dehumanizing action and word. Being sexually assaulted was what now seems an everyday occurrence, but I never spoke to anyone about what I had been living through. I always had to shake it off and give them some excuse. There was cocaine, dealers, pimps, prostitution, theft, and violence. I kept moving from club to club, even changing states, but it was the same. I suffered with anxiety, had panic attacks. I felt trapped up until the last day I danced.

I fear that if anyone knew all of my truth that they would judge me. I’m scared to admit that I was a co-creator of my reality, that I put myself in bad situations. I fear that working in such an environment did permanent damage to my spirit. I fear that I can't find another way of making money to support my life and family, and of being pulled back into the work through financial desperation. I fear admitting that I was addicted to a toxic lifestyle. I fear that my anxiety and depression will come back due to not healing from it, at all.





Kirk
My fear comes from PTSD. I am 62. I was sent to California’s most violent prison for eight years for a non-violent marijuana crime. I left prison in 2008, but I am doing life without parole because my mind never left. I fear being incarcerated again even for a few hours, that could be the final straw. Right now, standing in the cold wind, I fear camping for the entire winter will kill me.

I am not afraid of anybody and that scares me more than anything else. That I may be forced to defend myself and harm another. It almost happened here in Golden where I camp because it feels safer, though I have never in my life hurt another human being.

Perhaps I am getting better. But my night fears are taking my life. Suicide on the nightly installment plan, I call it. I look like a horrible accident; you don’t want to look yet can’t look away.





Tyler
The military chewed me up and spit me out. I thought I couldn’t tell anyone about my sadness. I thought it made me weak. At least that’s what they told me. So I buried it all and with it I sank. What I fear most is that the thought of suicide will finally win one day. I don’t want to die and I’m scared I might lose this fight.





Shannon
I’m afraid of brokenness, of always being a victim. Scared of being alone in ways most people cannot fathom.

I had a friend being stalked by her ex, Jason, who was just out of prison. One night when she was closing Subway alone, he came inside and sat by the back door saying nothing, just staring at her. My boyfriend Jeremy and I picked her up and brought her back to our place. An hour and a half later, Jason smashed through our bedroom window with his roommate and said he was going to kill all three of us. Jason's roommate held Jeremy from behind as Jason savagely stabbed and slashed him. I clutched Jeremy to me, desperately trying to plug all the gaping holes. No one even came out of their homes and I know they heard my screams for help but help wasn’t coming and he's gasping and fighting for me, trying to not leave me alone, as I had just lost my dad and had little else. I had to tell him it was okay, that I would be okay and that he could let go now. I felt him relax and slip away with his last breath. With him went my entire life. Gone.

Jason’s roommate is out on bond and heard me testify at pretrial that I saw everything. I've already received threats about the upcoming murder trial and I'm still in the same place it happened. Feeling safe is a luxury I only daydream about, ‘cause when I finally succumb to sleep I'm in that life-shattering moment reliving my agony or hiding from some dark terrible thing coming to consume all that I am.

For me, fear is a constant companion.





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