Clowns and Men
The Monsters Under the Bed
Like most children, I have a monster under the bed. (I say "have" because they still unnerve me to this day.) My monster under the bed is the simple Clown. There is really no story to this fear, no trauma as a child to talk about. I just started to fear them. My father's first gift to me was a porcelain clown. When the Clown Craze in 2016 occurred it was my worst nightmare in real life and it didn't help that I found out from my father while at the mall parking lot at 9 PM. And with the remake of IT late last year, I wasn't having any of it. Just looking up the dates of the clown sightings I got uneasy with the clown pictures that popped up with the articles.
Now that I am older and have gone through school and planning to continue my studies, I now understand that fear more than ever. I was never afraid of the clown because one scared me as a child since I have never had direct contact with a clown.
I'm afraid of what lies underneath the face paint and the never fading smile. For what is more frightening than not knowing who truly lies underneath the disguise. I fear clowns for the same reason people are afraid of someone in a ski mask-also the fact they have a chainsaw- we don't know what they want. What they truly want to do. But honestly, we fear the ski mask and the face paint for the same reason we are afraid of the dark because we don't know what lies within it.
The people we meet every day and the people we already know may not be who we imagine they are. They may be someone completely different. If you can't trust them to be the same in public as they are in their home then who can we trust? Especially as the way things are right now in the world.
But I'm not here to tell you to fear the dark; I'm here to tell you that our monsters under the bed had a purpose. And that purpose was to prepare us in order to venture into the dark to take risks and be wary of people we may believe to have figured out but don't let it stop you from being kind to people simply because they are different. Because the different is the unknown. The only way we made it to the moon was not from fear but from curiosity. If we don't try to understand what lies in the darkness what secrets could have been forgotten. What treasures may lie in the darkness of the cave? Only when we shine a light in the darkness, remove the mask and the facepaint, will we truly know if there was any danger in the first place.
Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt said: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
About the Creator
Stephany Martinez
I have a love for reading and for the supernatural. And I have a dog who has a lot of personality for being so small.
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