Late in August of last year, I dropped a bomb on my friends. After thinking about it a great deal, I would not be attending school for the 2016-2017 school year.

Even though I had decided earlier during the summer, I refrained from telling my friends about it for one very simple reason: I was afraid. Before coming to college, the possibility of needing to take a year off from school had never occurred to me, and I was unsure what the future held.

Of course, my friends deserved to know my plans, but I was hesitant to tell them. I was afraid of officially stating my decision because it would set in stone my absence from my friends for an entire year.

I was afraid because, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure what my immediate future would look like. I was particularly terrified because I didn’t even know if I was coming back to school in a year.

The idea of not seeing my UVA friends ever again felt like a crushing existential meltdown of fear and loneliness. All of these combined fears shattered my self-confidence and motivation to plan for the future. After August rolled around and everyone went back to school without me, I felt adrift and lost.

In the midst of all this, however, a mantra from Frank Herbert’s novel Dune came back to me. As corny as this may sound, it shined a small ray of light into the darkness of my self-imposed mental prison.

The first line of the mantra stands thus: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.” Throughout 2016, I felt especially consumed by the fears I mentioned above. In the spring alone, I grappled with such issues as the death of a friend and a grandmother, breaking up with my then-girlfriend, and doing poorly in school.

During the summer, I was forced to come to grips with the reality that I could not both address my problems and remain in school. I felt immense shame at informing the clubs that I had committed to as an officer that I now had to back out. It felt like a deeply personal betrayal of my close friends, and a total obliteration of my self-worth. My mind felt constantly weighed down by fear of consequence and the future.

The coming of autumn only brought more fuel for the bonfire of fear and negative emotion that burned my psyche more every day. My parents’ marriage fell apart, culminating in their divorce. I felt compelled to lie to my parents about the drugs I was using to cope. A close friend still at UVA had been struggling with her own issues as well.

During this winter of our mutual discontent, we talked almost every day. This went a long way towards helping both of us not lose our minds over the fears that threatened to consume us both.

The mantra continues: “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.”

Every so often, I would read through the passages of Dune about Paul Atreides’s struggles with fear, which helped me maintain a sense of perspective in the darkest times. While they often seemed larger than life, my problems were (and are) very small from a cosmic point of view.

Probably the single most important step in facing my fear came when I told my mother I wanted to move in with my father after their divorce. For a long time, I lived in fear of my mother’s judgment concerning my decisions. It took all my courage to tell her that I had to leave her house in order to support my father. My decision felt tainted by selfish motivations as well.

My mother had been the stricter parent while I was growing up, and while she only ever had my best interests at heart, I felt that it was time for me to move beyond the constraints of my youth. My father had always been more laid back, but he still encouraged me in his own way to both be better and push myself. I felt that living with him would grant me the freedom I needed to decide my own future.

While this decision troubled me greatly at the time, I felt much more at peace once it was done.

The mantra finishes: “Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” My year off tested me in more ways than I could’ve imagined. I became acquainted with fear, loss, death, grief, anger, and despair as never before. I had ample time to spend reflecting on the choices that led me to where I was. I leaned hard on my father for wisdom and self-awareness too.

During my year off, he had been in recovery for alcoholism and coping with a failed marriage, and we spoke at length on several occasions about fear. Instead of beating him down, these things inspired in him greater personal growth and self-awareness, and I couldn’t be prouder of how far he’s come.

When I think about what I’ve learned, I’ve arrived at a few tentative conclusions. Courage is not the absence of fear; rather, courage is accepting that fear is and will always be a part of me. Although I may surround myself with illusions in the name of pushing away fear, they are only temporary measures that do nothing to actually fix my problems. It takes more strength than I thought I had, but I’m slowly learning to see the world as it really is, rather than how I would like it to be.

At the risk of making too many pop culture references, “I am the master of my fate –– I am the captain of my soul.” Before, this would have been just another movie quote to me, but now I actually feel like I am living it in my own small way.

After all that, I am now back at UVA as a third year, and I feel much more emotionally stable and ready to tackle my remaining time here on Grounds.

Just a week ago, I happened across an application to Odyssey that challenged me to rise above my fear once again. I filled out the application and submitted it, and here I am a week later.

Now, I’m doing what I thought was impossible just a year ago; I let go of my fear, and only I remain.