Fear: adistressingemotionarousedbyimpendingdanger,evil,pain,etc.,whetherthethreatisrealorimagined;thefeelingorconditionof beingafraid.
I remember being 10 years old, & telling my best friends that I could not wait until I turned 20, it just always seemed like the golden age. Whenever I was younger, I thought I would have my whole life figured out by 20. I would be in college, with a boyfriend who went to school with me. I would drive a red convertible, slug bug of course. I would have perfect grades, have the perfect social life, & have the perfect wardrobe. At 10 years old, I was convinced that whenever I was 20 that nothing was going to be able to stop me.
Well, less than a month away from my 20th birthday & I can reassure you that my predictions for 20 year old me did not turn out that way. I got to thinking, why? Why cant 20 actually be the golden age for me? So, I created a goal for myself & the year of 20. That goal was to stop living my life in fear of the future, & to fully grasp where I am now.
One of my greatest fears is that I will not live my life to the fullest, & that the only thing waiting for me at the end is unhappiness. We are constantly told that no second of our lives should be wasted, & that life is too short to be lived unhappy. Something that I have recently realized is that I am the only one that determines my happiness, not my surroundings or circumstances. I realized that I tend to view happiness as an object rather than a state of mind.
Another area of my life that I am seeking to improve on is loving where I am now in life, & to stop living in fear of the future. While our pasts have already happened, living in the future can restrain our present. I persistently find myself dwelling on my life years in the future, just like I used too whenever I was young & thought 20 was the magic number that would make my life feel like a movie. Setting up scenarios for your life in the future is a great way to create goals for yourself, but it is also an easy way to set yourself u for disappointment when things don't go as planned. A hope I have for myself over the course of the next year is that I embrace each season of my life whole heartedly, & that I love each day where I am because 20 years old is a time that I will never get back again. Life is uncontrollable, & is constantly changing and if we live worrying about the future & the aspects of life that we have no jurisdiction over the only place we will find ourselves in is disappointment.
I am done hindering the quality of my youth because I tend to live in fear. While fear can make life difficult, once we become mindful of our fears, they can make us question who we are, what we want, and how we live our lives.