When you get asked, "what's your biggest fear", you often get answers such as spiders, heights, fire, snakes, or anything else that's simple as that. But for me, my biggest fear has always been the unknown.
Growing up, I always like to know what I'm doing or what's going to happen instead of going into a situation blindly. But that's the thing about life, you never know what could happen in the next few minutes, days, or years. You just have to go into every situation blindly, hoping for the best.
I let my fear get the best of me a lot and looking back on it, I regret those moments. I wish I could go back in those moments and tell my younger self to just forget about it and go for it. But that's the thing about fear, it's so emotionally distressful that it's difficult to conquer it.
I remember the times where I would be sitting behind the diving blocks right before my race and letting all these doubtful thoughts run through my mind, questioning my abilities or wondering if I'd let my coach and teammates down. My fear let itself create a lot of "what if" situations in my mind and I got scared of those situations, which led me to performing poorly because I couldn't focus on my race properly.
Now I'm in college and I've noticed myself getting more anxious late at night because when I can't sleep, I think about the biggest unknown in life. The future.
I've encountered people and friends throughout campus that love their majors and know what they want to study and as happy as I am for them, it frightens me. As of right now, I don't love or like my major. And if I were to change my major, I wouldn't know what I would change it to because I simply don't know. I don't know what I want to do with my life. I fear that I will end up sticking with my current major and graduate still not liking it. Or even worse, changing my major into something that I thought I wanted to study but then ending up regretting it later.
"You're still young. You have your whole life to figure out what you want." But you see, I don't want to be 30 or maybe even 56 and finally figuring out what I want to do. I have this need to know now so I can plan what I want to do next with my life. I have goals and dreams that I want to achieve but I always feel like me not knowing what I want to do with my major or life in general is blocking me from reaching those goals and dreams.
But although I've been trying to conquer my biggest fear by living more in the moment and doing what makes me happy, I still have a hard time trying to accept the unknown. But to get over your fears, you have to conquer them and that's what I've been doing for the past couple years of my life. Therefore, I know that I'm reaching that light at the end of the tunnel eventually.
