Michael “Marsh” Marshall:
(born 13 August 1983).
British skeptical activist and the editor of The Skeptic magazine since September 2020. He is the co-founder and vice-president of the Merseyside Skeptics Society and co-host of its official podcast, Skeptics with a K, project director of the Good Thinking Society, and has occasionally written for The Times, The Guardian and New Statesman. As of 2022, Marshall is a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
You can’t stop being afraid by just pretending everything that scares you isn’t there.
The quote means that ‘you can’t erase fear just by denying it’ or acting like it isn’t real.
Instead, it suggests that fear needs to be ‘acknowledged and faced’, not ignored—because the fear doesn’t disappear simply because you “pretend” it away.
In other words:
– 🚫 ‘Pretending’ won’t remove the feeling
– ✅ ‘Facing/processing’ is what actually changes how you handle fear.
📚 Origin 🔍:
The exact quotation you provided—“You can’t stop being afraid by just pretending everything that scares you isn’t there.”—is ‘often discussed online with an attribution to Michael Marshall’ (sometimes specifically as Michael Marshall Smith).
However, ’there isn’t a clear, widely verifiable bibliographic source’ (page number / confirmed original publication) that I can cite with high confidence from the quote alone. This kind of quote is commonly:
– quoted in forums, memes, and reviews,
– with ‘inconsistent attribution’, and
– without a precise citation.
✍️ Author👤:
– Most common attribution: Michael Marshall
– Confidence level: ‘medium to low’ for exact authorship of the ‘exact sentence’, unless we can match it to a specific book passage.
