This morning, I woke up scared. I started my day at 5:28 a.m., marking the end of an exhausting nightmare characterised by Spanish class, calculus, and my mortal enemy: bugs. Among these fears, bugs reign supreme. Simply being within a five-foot radius of any bug is enough to jumpstart my entire nervous system. If my early ancestors bravely fended off ferocious beasts to protect their territory, I’m sure they would applaud my fear of creatures so microscopic that they’re invisible without my glasses. They would probably be incredibly proud to witness me shriek and then spray a minuscule insect with an entire bottle of bug spray. 

 As I contemplated the choices that would determine the course of the rest of my life, I was simultaneously brushing my teeth. I take great pride in my teeth and what they do for me. My dentist loves my teeth, which are so straight and well-aligned that they suspect a history of braces. Astonishment floods their faces when I answer in the negative. I won’t talk about the singular cavity in my favourite molar. Rest in peace and pieces, second molar. I miss you dearly. So I was there, sitting on the cold bathroom floor at 1 a.m., when, out of the depths of hell, came a most repulsive creature. This bug was no more than one centimetre long, a black blob with several spiky black legs jutting out from all sides, but immediately every muscle in my body tensed painfully. And the audacity! To scuttle in unannounced and scare my heart into my throat? I ran from the bathroom, defeated and frightened, and resorted to finishing the job at the kitchen sink. I had lost yet another battle in my war against the bugs. 

So, I’m scared of bugs. And calculus. And speaking in Spanish class. But all these fears grip my heart differently. In my nightmare, I persevered through calculus questions given only in rapid-fire Spanish, but the bugs had me up in a flash with a heartbeat of 140 bpm, cold sweat on my forehead, and lungs begging for a drop of air. When my amygdala initiates the fight-or-flight response, I choose flight the second a bug enters my line of sight. My Spanish class is a different beast. I desperately want to run far, far away, all the way to New Zealand, before it’s my turn to present to the class. But my body won’t let me. As I walk to the bathroom for the 50th time in one hour, my heart tells my brain to secretly explode without me knowing. Although years of evolution tell my stomach to empty itself in preparation to make a break for it, I gently remind my brain that I cannot run more than a mile with or without an empty bladder. 

Then there’s calculus. Sweet, sweet calculus. I fear calculus only slightly less than I fear bugs. I’m scared of failing. I’m scared of what I don’t know. Calculus fills me with dread, not only because it’s a whole new genre of math, but also because it’s not like any fear I’ve felt before. Of my almost 16 years of life, I’ve spent most of them terrified of something. Whether it was going to school, the dark, lurking monsters, heights, bugs, or loud noises, I was scared. Despite my consistent state of fear, none of these things affected my future in a significant way. Maybe I couldn’t be an undertaker, a prison guard, a pilot, an entomologist, or a construction worker, but that was fine with me. My goals in life, although nonexistent at the time, didn’t feel threatened. But then came high school, and with it came calculus, and my level of fear changed and reached heights I had never dreamed it would. I’m scared of bad grades, missing out, not finding my niche, workload, extracurriculars, my GPA, college, the SATs, APs, if my teachers secretly hate me, if I’ll have regrets, if I’m wasting my time, if I’m not good enough, and the list goes on. It’s safe to say I’m scared of the future.

Even worse, I pretend the future doesn’t exist because I’m terrified of it. I’m terrified of the uncertainty, the dreams the world could crush, and failing. I’m petrified when I think of life without my mother or my cat, Fork. Can I handle a 9-to-5 office job, or do I need more? Should I marry rich, should I fall in love, or should I move to the Netherlands? I don’t know. Everything I know is stored in my brain, which knows the things I’ve forgotten and the things I remember, which feels incredibly unfair because it’s my brain. But it’s a little early in life for me to be having an existential crisis, so I’ll take a deep breath. Let my heart fall back to the rhythm of my lungs expanding and deflating, and let my brain slow down to a quiet whir. 

Though I’m still scared, I know I’ve been scared before. Sure, my fears have changed, but they’ll change again, and again, and again, and again. One day, my current fears will be so insignificant that I’ll point and laugh at teenage me. I’ll be okay, even if I’m still scared of bugs.