The other day, I was freaking out about leaving to spend three months alone in a foreign country. I think my panic actually began because I couldn’t imagine getting from any particular point A to any particular point B completely by myself. When I think back on everything I’ve been through, even the toughest things weren’t faced alone. This was going to be different.

So, I was sitting in my room imagining myself utterly lost in the middle of central London and I told my sister I was scared. (More terrified, but we’ll pretend I was a little braver than I was) and my sister, the girl that has known me everyday of the past twenty years, said “I heard that if it scares you, that means you should probably do it.” And like most instances in my life, she was right.

When I think about my “big moments”—those moments that all other moments are compared too—I was usually scared, or at least a little uncomfortable. Because it’s really true isn’t it? That life begins at the edge of our comfort zone. All of those feel-good greeting cards are coming back to haunt me in real and tangible ways. The things that define us as people are usually those big moments that scare the sh** out of us and drag us into the unknown.

So here’s what I’ve got so far: those cringe worthy clichés that your second aunt posts on Facebook may be cringe worthy, but that doesn’t make them untrue. They may not be original, but when you’re terrified and standing on the edge of everything you’ve ever known, they tend to bring a certain level of comfort that feels a little like your mom when you’re sick and in the second grade. Leap and the net will appear. There’s no time like the present. Fake it ‘til you make it. Blah, blah, blah. It’s everything we’ve been told since the first time we had no idea what we were doing (which was probably, like, first day of kindergarten in mismatched clothing).

There’s a simple kind of bliss in accepting the clichés you once laughed at, and in the end, so much peace in knowing the scary stuff is just the really great disguise of something wonderful. Even if it’s not? We’ll never know unless we live it.

And if all else fails: chop your hair off, put your phone down, and take a deep breath. After all, nothing is permanent until we say so.