"The only way to deal with fear is to face it head on"

Fear multiplies when we circle around it; it diminishes when we step toward it. Kadare’s stark line refuses the comfort of detours: anxiety cannot be negotiated with from a distance. The mind inflates what it won’t examine, crafting shadows larger than the object that cast them. Approach collapses that distortion. What is vague becomes specific; what feels infinite takes a shape that can be handled.

Facing fear is not reckless bravado. It is clarity. To meet something head on is to refuse the evasions that keep us trapped, avoidance, rationalization, endless preparation that never becomes action. It is the discipline of naming the fear precisely, defining its borders, and taking a first concrete step that contradicts the urge to flee. Often anticipation is harsher than encounter; once inside the thing we dreaded, attention replaces panic, and the next step appears.

There is a moral dimension as well. Fear guards the thresholds of growth: intimacy, creation, truth-telling, dissent. To move through it is to affirm what matters more than safety. Retreat calcifies into smaller rooms; courage opens new ones. Repetition turns courage into a habit, the nervous system learning that volatility is survivable and uncertainty navigable.

On a communal level, fear thrives by isolating people. It tells each person they are alone, and that silence is protection. Meeting it together, speaking, organizing, refusing, shrinks its power, because fear is dispersed when shared and named. Literature and art participate in this act by giving shape to what terrifies, making it speakable.

None of this promises the eradication of fear. The aim is not to feel nothing but to be free enough to act in its presence. Facing it head on is a practice: start small, keep your word to yourself, gather allies, adjust as you learn. Each honest confrontation redraws the map of what is possible, and the terrain of the self grows larger than the shadow that once covered it.