Stop Calling It “FEAR”

I like the color blue.

The downstairs family room in our house is painted in shades of blue.

It’s definitely not painted red.

The choice to paint those walls blue instead of red was not because my husband, Tom, and I are erythrophobic (afraid of the color red).

We aren’t afraid of red; we just wanted the room to be blue.

Not red.

When I order food at a Mexican restaurant, I ask them to remove the cilantro.

Not because I am cilantrophobic (I made that word up!), but because coriander/cilantro tastes like soap to me.

I prefer my food to not taste like soap, so I ask to have the cilantro left off.

I wear a seatbelt when I’m in a car, both as the driver and as a passenger.

Do I buckle up because I’m dystychiphobic (afraid of accidents)?

Well, sort of.

I’d prefer not to be in an accident, and they DO scare me.

But my decision to buckle up is more because I choose to take a precaution that will increase my likelihood of surviving a bad accident if I do have one. It makes sense.

Injuries are painful. I want to avoid both injuries and pain.

So, I guess I AM traumatiphobic (afraid of injury) and algophobic (afraid of pain). I’ll own that.

No one has ever accused me of being hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobic (afraid of long words), and for good reason.

I LOVE words, especially LONG WORDS!

Fact – Taking a precaution against something occurring doesn’t automatically equal fear of that thing.

Like laundry. I’m not afraid of laundry, but I do try to avoid it.

I am becoming weary of people accusing those who wear a face covering and/or have received the Covid vaccination of being motivated by FEAR.

My choices with regard to face coverings and vaccinations aren’t about fear.

Am I afraid of COVID-19 and its variants?

I don’t know, maybe.

I don’t know how my body would handle COVID if I did get it, so I guess I have some healthy respect and aversion to the idea, sure. I have had those I know and love die from COVID. It is not something I want to catch.

But I have the same aversion and healthy fear of catching any illness that would be uncomfortable and inconvenient at best, and fatal at worst.

Alzheimer’s Disease? Stroke? Typhoid fever? Ringworm? Fatal overdose of Tylenol (it’s not pretty)?

So here are MY reasons for choosing to wear a face coving during the COVID pandemic:

• Because it keeps at least some of MY germs from traveling to others.
• Because I want to be considerate of the needs of others as well as respecting my own.
• Because, based on what we know right now, wearing a face covering seems like a reasonable way to reduce the spread of germs, not in totality, but in general.
• Because we are required to wear them in certain situations.
• Bonus: in the cooler months of the year, wearing a face coving provides warmth!

MY reasons for choosing to take the COVID-19 vaccine:

• Based on the information we have right now, it makes good sense to be vaccinated in order to increase my chances of having a less severe case of, and surviving, COVID-19 if I do get it.
• Being vaccinated makes it easier/possible for me to participate in things that are important to me.
• I believe the benefits of being vaccinated outweigh the risks/downside.
• Again, based on our best knowledge right now, being vaccinated is the safest choice to make, all things considered.

Science is the study of what IS and our ability to make sense of what we observe that IS.

Science changes all the time.

Except it really doesn’t “change”.

It’s not a one and done, concrete-same-answer-forever kind of thing. Science is always dynamic, otherwise it isn’t really science. We will learn more as we go along, as our abilities to observe and make sense of what is observed improve, and because of that, recommendations will change.

Bleeding a person with leeches used to be the answer to most ailments. The smartest doctors swore by it. If they didn’t know what else to do, they would bleed you. Then we learned more about germs and what happens in our bodies at a microscopic level. We developed more effective treatments that pinpointed the real cause of the illness (at least more of the time…). Leeches were still appropriate sometimes. People were leery of NOT bleeding a person who was critically ill. But because we were able to observe what was wrong with the person more specifically and process information more keenly, the best method of treatment “changed”.

Look at our good friend the EGG, and how it was bad for us, then good for us, then bad, and now good again (I think??). Nobody lied to us about the egg’s danger or benefit. The “answer” depends on how we look at it, how much we can observe, what question we are asking, and what makes sense based on what we know at the time.

Egg’s cousin BUTTER has been through similar trauma of being deemed healthy versus dangerous

People weren’t very happy with Copernicus when he told them that the sun didn’t revolve around the earth – that indeed the earth revolved around the sun. The powers that be wanted to kill him for that kind of blasphemy. But really, all that happened was our ability to observe what was happening and process that information had become more refined. We learned more and realized what we once thought was true, wasn’t.

And what about Pluto! Pluto will always be a planet in my heart, even though our ability to observe and refine the definition of “planet” has become more detailed and specific over time, and Pluto has been thrown off the island. We learn more as we go along, and adjust accordingly. To not do so would be foolish.

So.

Please don’t confuse my decision to wear a face covering or get the vaccine as being motivated by fear.

My choices are based on current best practices, respect for authority and for other humans, and reasonability.

This post is not an invitation to argue against my reasoning. My purpose is to own my choices and share my reasoning with you.