… when you’re afraid of everything.
Are you the type of person who worries about your psychologist’s feelings? Then you’ve come to t§he right place. And if you’re not, you’re still very welcome, we don’t discriminate.
All the things in life you can be afraid of
Heartbreak
Commitment
Staying in a job you hate
Starting the job you love
getting fired
actually getting fired
more heartbreak
swimming in the ocean
CO-poisoning
fire
insects
disease and sickness
Talking to strangers
Not talking to anyone
Being alone
Being in a crowd
missing out on things
Having to be somewhere you don’t want to be
You can probably see the irony in this list. How is it possible to be afraid of a thing.. and also being afraid of the exact opposite. Well, if the title didn’t warn you enough, at least you have it listed here: when I wrote “afraid of everything”, I actually meant “everything”. Except pigeons. And cats. Although it depends which ones… but most of them are chill. And snakes. I have this extremely weird thing where I’m afraid of literally everything except an animal of which almost everyone is afraid – and with good reason. One time I saw a green mamba and I actively had to refrain myself from going closer to it. Telling myself that was probably not a good idea. I mean, I wouldn’t want to get bitten by a snake, for sure. But somehow the thought of wasps scare me more than the snakes. But maybe I just haven’t been close enough to one – I probably shouldn’t jinx it.
There once was a singer who said “to me, Fearless is not the absence of Fear. It’s being scared to death and doing it anyway”. The singer is Taylor Swift. And if you’re still “too cool” for her, you should probably stop reading now, because then you will definitely be “too cool” for everything that will follow.
I will follow this famous line by a quote of a person who is only slightly less famous than Taylor Swift: my high school best friend. Who actually works on a very high position in the government now. Which is an interesting thing, since his biggest fears at 17 were “politics” and “working a desk job”. Oh the irony. And also we don’t speak that often anymore, so I’m not entirely sure about any of this. But at the stage of life when he spoke the quote, we were quite close. Close enough to get into a fight about how meaningful our studies and possible jobs later would be. If only we’d known then… Actually, the most interesting thing about this fight was that it happened on a beach in Costa Rica. In the jungle, far away from civilization, while lying in a hammock and eating coconuts. One of those things about looking back is that you wish you could hit your past self in the head and tell yourself to focus on the coconut, the hammock and the incredible sunset – you know – things that are about a billion times more meaningful than the supposed meaningful desk job you will carry out later and complain about every week.
But I guess that’s why time travel will never be allowed – we would end up with way too many “past selves” getting smacked in the head and who wants to be responsible for that.
So, back to traveling the world and being afraid of things. Let’s put my psychology degree to use for once and start with a definition. What is fear? It can be defined as …
