Perhaps fear is the feeling you get waiting to go on an upside down ride, or the feeling when your grandma has a stroke. Maybe it’s the feeling when you see an amber alert on tv knowing that just as well could have been you. Maybe it is the fear of drowning when you swim in the ocean. Those are all fearful things, because fear is the feeling of being scared of what is going to happen next. It can also be the feeling something bad is going to happen, something I have had a lot of practice in. A thing I fear, causing my spine to tingle whenever I think about it, is not a person or event but rather a thing. A thing that could not kidnap me, a thing that could not make me drown, but rather just a thing that does not cause harm unless you decide to use it. Drugs does not force you to take itself, or follow you home from school. It's rather a choice I have not feared for myself, but rather watching most of my friends go down because of it. Losing more people to a thing such as drugs is what I fear most. I have faced my fears and let people go emotionally because they have turned into people I have not recognized because of drugs.

I have many fears that lingerie in the back of my head on a rainy day, such as being kidnapped or not getting to live until I am old. These thoughts appear every now and then, but I have the ability to shake them off. I always thought and was to prepare for people kidnapping me, and trying to work out and eat healthy to avoid dying early. I thought when I was little my fear would be people and the horrible things they could do, but I later discovered my biggest fear is but a mere object. My fear cannot break into your house. My fear cannot force you to do anything. My fear itself is harmless in the fact that it can not force you to do it, it is a willing choice. At least that is what I thought before seeing it firsthand. My fear is not rapists, kidnappers, bullies, but rather molly, cocaine, weed, and drinking. I do not fear for myself, I fear for the people around me, rightfully so.

I have not lost friends to fights, but rather to them changing into somebody could not recognize. They did not change out of prosperity but rather out of becoming a walking zombie. In middle school the first occurrence took place, where my best friend at the time was smoking weed. She asked me if I wanted any and I politely declined. I did not know at the time that weed could act as a gateway drug, or how once you start you might not like how ‘nervous you feel’ while off it.’ I saw her daily and she keep using the pot more and more, but soon the changes happened. She was late for school while I was still early. She was still in bed while she used to be cooking. She was skipping school now instead of skipping rope, she was smoking hoops while the only hoops she used to talk about were around her ears. She was morphing into a person always stoned, and I witnessed her loose herself. I tried to stop her as she switched from weed to lsd, but there was no point. “It helps me!” is all she would scream. I did not hate her but rather the source behind it, the weed, the lsd, the meth or cocaine. She choose the drugs over herself. I resented the drugs from here on out, not her, but the drugs won the custody battle. She was there's. Over the period of years after I lost my friend to the clutches of drugs more would come into my life of friendly faces only to be turned into lost faces. Drugs took another victim when my friend since I was a child, turned into somebody I could not recognize. She went to church every Sunday, and never argued for the fear of being wrong. She got straight A’s and was the team leader of any sport we played. We used to stay up late talking, we were inseparable. But something mysterious caught her attention next, the name of that was weed. She went from talking about curling her hair, to talking about the next time she could get high. She went from attending church to attending parties. She went from drinking orange juice to drinking vodka. She went from stealing cookies to stealing four lokos. She went from weed, to lsd. She said she grew up, but growing up is not doing drugs to feel better, it is facing the pain of growing older and coming out more mature, not knocked up on meth. She left me because I would not do that stuff with her, and I cried for weeks. I made new friends of course, but most of them ended up going down the same path. I always wondered where there parents were and why they did not notice, but I guess they hid it. Sometimes I wish they would have hid it from me.

Drugs can get into your veins, and once it does it will swallow you whole. I have not and will never know how it feels but I will know the pain of watching somebody leave because of drugs. Drugs brought them higher than they have ever felt, drugs made everything feel easy. I always wanted to ask why take the easy way out. Is drugs what you want to someday find in your daughters room at night and realize that is the answer shes always with her friends? Are drugs the thing you want your son to go to in the future instead of you? Do you want to have to obey an object, and let it control your life? Don't you want better? Are all things I wanted to say. Everytime I make a friend I end up losing them to drugs, I only pray to never watch one die because of it. I fear making friends and opening up because most of them someday will only care about how high they can get, instead of going to the movies.If weed will be at the party instead of what kind of music they will play is all they cared about until weed would switch to cocaine. I thought drugs were rare, but being in my middle and high school I realize they are everywhere. My fear is not to start, my fear is losing more friends and family to the addiction. It's watching them change until all they can care about is the next cycle.

Not all fears are ones you could face, some you have to sit back and watch for the rest of your life. Getting over a fear like this is not to accept it, I will never accept it. Instead facing this fear is the ability to tell your friends how this isn't them, how bad it is for your mental and physical help and try to tell others to get them help. To face this fear you must accept failure. You must accept the person using is causing pain to everybody. Getting over this fear is accepting not the drugs but rather that you are going to lose people, and sometimes it is admitting to feeling powerless when you have tried all you can and cannot help enough. Getting over this fear is not smiles and happiness, it is learning how to do the best you can and then accepting you are only human and cannot save everybody. Drugs are awful, fearing something is awful, but sometimes the way of facing fears is to let yourself know, your best to save everybody is all you can do and not let it prevent you from opening yourself up to more people in the future. Drugs pull people in, the only thing we can do, is vow to let it never be us.