What is your biggest fear?

I am surrounded by my biggest fears, my deepest insecurities. They stare at me, and scream "shame on you! How dare you walk in here like you belong?"
Do I belong here? Will I ever feel like I belong?

Hundreds of thousands of words make up thousands of books, I can smell them, I can feel them, they can sense my fear. I touch them, longingly, willing them to be mine, to not just sit on a shelf near my bed telling the world that I own them, have read them, no. I wish they were a part of me, I want to inhale them, will them inside my brain, but instead they make me feel small. Lacking. Inadequate.

Of course, I pick out the book that makes me feel worst of all, like I am beating myself up for my own shortcomings, it is simply called "You", by Caroline Kepnes, and I think it was written for me.

"You're not the standard insecure nympth hunting for Faulkner you'll never finish, never start; Faulkner that will harden and calcify, if books could calcify, on your nightstand; You don't stage Faulkner and your jeans hang loose and you're too sun-kissed for Stephen King and too untrendy for Heidi Julavits and who, who will you buy?"
...
"Thank God for a customer and it's hard to scan his predicable Salinger--then again, it's always hard to do that. This guy is, what, thirty-six and he's only now reading Franny and Zooey? And let's get real. He's not reading it. It's just a front for the Dan Browns at the bottom of his basket. Work in a bookstore and learn that most people in this world feel guilty about being who they are."
 ...
"Everybody is always striving to be better, lose five pounds, read five books, go to a museum, buy a classical record and listen to it and like it. What we really want to do is eat doughnuts, read magazines, buy pop albums. And books? F-- books. Get a Kindle."

 Turns out the book is not about me, after all. It is about a psycho stalker who turns into the guy he thinks the girl will want, while killing those who get in his way. Ya. Does that make me crazy because I started reading it and couldn't put it down? It's intoxicating.

I started to lose my faith in books, and once lost it is truly hard to reclaim. Books used to be my love, something to get lost in, transport me to a different time, make me feel better about myself, different, like I was simply misunderstood in my world.

A few bad books can turn me off, but here I am on a Sunday, in a place where I so wish to belong. There is a dog nudging my leg, an older man excuses the dog, says he's just being friendly, and I can swear he is gay. The man, not the dog. He calls his mother, and I wonder how old she is. He reassures her that he is fine, he's out shopping, he didn't call because he was busy, is she okay, I wonder about their co-dependent relationship, if his mother is the only significant relationship in his life, I wonder what he is looking for in here, because trust me, we are all looking for something.

The playlist just seems to match the decor so perfectly, and a song comes on, it is so beautiful, a melody sans words, and suddenly I need to know what it is. I ask the manager sheepishly, like I have to apologize for not knowing what song it is, not being hip enough, and he tells me, it is a remake of the song "Use Somebody" by Kings of Leon, played by 2cellos, and just like that I feel like an idiot. So I don't even know good music.

I hate these places because of how they make me feel. I stopped writing because of how it makes me feel. I hate how it feels like the world's a club, and either you're in or you're not.

What is my biggest fear? That I'll never be good enough. 

This doesn't change anything. I'm going to finish reading the book, self-loathing and all.

And then.

And then.

Seeing my blog drop to three weeks, it's gotta mean something.