Fear of Life

You know, I can't remember the last thing I did that someone didn't think was wrong. My whole life I never really wanted to tell anyone what I really wanted because I knew that someone I told would think that I was stupid for it. I never had any real goals or dreams and if I had even the tiniest little thought, I really never shared it with anyone.
Sometimes you feel like you are fearless. You think that nothing scares you. Not bugs or snakes or small spaces. I got over my fear of death, but then I think I started my fear of life. In kindergarten, I was terrified to speak to my teacher for no reason at all. I was afraid of getting on the wrong bus and not being able to get home from school. In 6th grade I was so afraid of going to junior high. In junior high I was afraid of going to high school. Every year I wanted to stay right where I was instead of moving on. Every year I forgot that the place that I was, was the place that I was afraid of the year before.
In high school I was afraid that no one would ever want to go to the prom with me and that even more than being embarrassed of no one wanting to go with me and not being able to go, that I would have to think about no one in the whole school wanting to go with me, and how much that would hurt.
In high school I never wanted to even think about college. I wanted to stay young and I didn't want to have to deal with it. Everyone else seemed to know what they wanted to do and the thought of college was so exciting to them. It was never exciting to me. I always thought that going away to school, growing up, leaving all my friends and my house, paying for things with money that I didn't have, would be horrible. I went away to school after picking a major at the last minute and I honestly didn't like it very much at all. Even though I had friends, I still seemed to feel like I had no one. My brother was the only person to ever come and visit me and I hated it when he left the one time that he visited me.
After that year was over, I thought for sure that I would be going back for 3 more years but things changed. I had new opportunities and I had to weigh my options. I was supposed to be a CA at the school that I went to, which I signed up for because the job comes with a free room and a free meal plan. I needed all the help that I could get because I really didn't have any money. But now I had the opportunity to go to school for free, but live at home and leave all of the friends that I had made. I had to think about it long and hard, and when it came down to it, I had to make the smarter choice. I knew that I could keep up with my friends as much as I could and that if any of them were true friends, they would do the same for me.
While I went to school, even for free I knew it was the wrong choice for me. I wasn't happy and this time I knew that it wasn't the money that was making me unhappy because I wasn't paying any. I knew that I had made the wrong choice in the program I was in and that I had to change it. After I quit my job because I was under so much stress, I suddenly had a lot of time to spend with myself. I needed to just relax and think about what I really wanted. I couldn't really tell anyone what I wanted because I knew that someone would think I was being stupid. I decided that I was going to just write out everything that I wanted without lying to myself so I wrote everything down. It turned out that there were a lot of things that I wanted that I wasn't doing. I wrote out a rough plan that I thought would be ideal and make me the most happy and tried to figure out how I could tackle just the first step. I stopped trying to figure out every little piece of the puzzle all in one sitting and just looked at the very first step.

Sure enough, I felt so much happier just knowing that I could be in control again. For the first time, I felt like I had a plan. Sometimes you just need to write everything out in tiny little steps and work on them one by one. On the way, if you need to scribble out a step, there won't be a big gap in your plan because the steps are so small. As long as you are happy about your progress, it doesn't matter how long it takes.