Fear, or anxiety, is driven by two factors: unfamiliarity and helplessness. And it can attack and be attacked from both of those angles. Either increase familiarity and habit enough that dealing with the object of your fear becomes so banal and workaday that it loses its emotional power, or develop your own knowledge and competence enough that you increase your own perception of your efficacy in the face of your fear, so you lose your sense of helplessness.

   Familiarity, or knowledge, and competence are the shields we wield against the terrors of the world. They let us manage them. The things themselves do not change, but our reactions and ourselves do. We become more capable of managing and dealing with the object of our fear. We cease to be in unknown and dark territory, helpless and directionless and without defense.

    The territory does not change. But we bring light to it, we become able to see and know it, and we gain tools and weapons, we become able to navigate and manipulate it, resist it, even make use of it. Fear is never conquered through avoidance. The object of our fear may pass, but we will still be as ignorant and helpless before it as ever, if it were to return. Only by facing it and by developing our capacity to confront it do we finally overcome it. But first you must look at it. You must see where it comes from and what it is that you fear. Only then can we place ourselves in proper relation to our fear. 

   Often life is not so simple, through, and there is not one fear, but two. And by avoiding one we choose the other, as a man who will not swim across a river must sometimes stumble across a trail of slippery stones instead, or as a retreating army escapes death but must face the unknown consequences of defeat. Fear in these cases must not only be faced, it must be ordered. We must recognize which of the opposing fears is truly the greater, and set the worse one behind us as a pursuing fire and the lesser before us as a trial. In submitting to go through one we set ourselves at a distance from the other. And maybe only that desire for escape will give us the proper motivation to enter territory we would rather avoid.