Fear...

By Vichara

Perhaps you may feel like an island of sanity sometimes when some around you and the world behaves in irritating and self-centered behavior. You are not alone. The revving and screeching tires of the car cutting you off today, the pompous self-entitlement look that someone may give you, some erratic act that has you shaking your head. All of these…based in fear. Fear that they have of not being noticed, fear that they don’t deserve things in life, fear that no one cares for them and numerous other shades of fear. We all have fears in one way or another as the world spins in unpleasant and unpredictable ways. The antidote lies in first recognizing this fact and not overreacting when you witness acts of fear and using patience and compassion with yourself and others to help disperse the fear.

feign • \FAYN\ • verb
1 : to give a false appearance of : induce as a false impression
2 : to assert as if true : pretend

Example Sentence:
Shortly after her mom told her that she would have to go to the doctor's, Kim confessed that she was only feigning illness because she forgot to study for a midterm.

Did you know?
"Feign" is all about faking it, but that hasn't always been so. In one of its earliest senses, "feign" meant "to fashion, form, or shape." That meaning is true to the term's Latin ancestor: the verb "fingere," which also means "to shape." The current senses of "feign" still retain the essence of the Latin source, since to feign something, such as surprise or an illness, requires one to fashion an impression or shape an image. Several other English words that trace to the same ancestor refer to things that are shaped with either the hands, as in "figure" and "effigy," or the imagination, as in "fiction" and "figment."