I’m roughly four classes away from graduating community college with my associate’s of science, which means I’m having to figure out what degree to commit to, and what university I ought to transfer to.

As exciting as this is, I’m anything but excited to graduate community college. In fact, I’m downright terrified to, for so many reasons. 

The prospect of graduating community college and moving onto university has forced me to think very seriously about my next steps; what career can I see myself pursuing, what university can I see myself attending, what will it take to pursue whatever degree I finally decide to commit to? 

The biggest question of them all: do I even have what it takes to succeed?

When considering all of the things I know I’ll have to do to succeed at university (and at life in general), I really don’t think that I have what it takes. At least, not yet. 

Why? Because of fear. 

This realization has led me to have several very emotional therapy sessions over the last couple months. Together, my therapist and I have delved deep into my long list of phobias and fears, theorizing about where each fear could’ve come from, and figuring out ways to overcome them (or, at the very least, cope with them so they don’t stop me dead in my tracks). 

Turns out, I have a lot of deeply-rooted fears that have been stopping me from living my life as it should be lived. Some fears are more justifiable and understandable than others. But none of them are helpful. Instead, all they do is keep me imprisoned in an imaginary cage conjured up by the dreadful “what if” game. 

So, what exactly are these fears? Well… there’s a lot. But, from what I’ve gathered, most of my fears originate from when I was a newborn baby. 

Needless to say, I had a really terrible introduction to life. I was born a blue baby due to Pulmonary Atresia, which meant I was immediately intubated and shipped off to the nearest hospital that could perform open heart surgery on my tiny heart. Because my mom had a C-section, she couldn’t join me at the hospital in Denver until after my open heart surgery, which I underwent when I was three days old. 

While recovering from surgery, I was attached to all sorts of machines that hissed and buzzed as they sucked fluids out of me, and forced oxygen into my airways fast enough to keep them from collapsing. I was constantly poked and prodded with needles, while also being denied any sort of pain medication because I was too small to handle it. 

That said, I was never left alone. Friends and family constantly held me and stayed by my side. Everyone did their best to make do with the situation, and treat me like a normal newborn as much as possible. In the end, I survived (obviously), but not without some deeply, deeply, deeply rooted psychological and physiological scars that still interfere with my daily life. 

Of course, the hospital still scares the ever-loving shit out of me, even if I’m going there just to drop something off or undergo a routine checkup. No matter how hard I try to hide the fear, the blood pressure cuff never lies. I once clocked a heart rate of 180 beats per minute while sitting perfectly still getting my vitals taken. The nurse was freaked out, until she pulled up my past charts and saw that my fast heart rate and high blood pressure were normal for days like that. 

Unfortunately, my hospital-related fears have greatly overgeneralized into other settings, resulting in me avoiding and freaking the fuck out things that I have no good reasons to avoid or panic about.  

My fear of elevators and airplanes (and being crammed into tight spaces in general), likely originates from having to be strapped to a table in order to get an MRI scan, until I developed just enough self-control to stay in one place while I got my lungs scanned. But I can’t say it was “self control” keeping me on that MRI table. Rather, it was paralyzing fear that kept me frozen in place. 

Due to this fear of planes and elevators, I hardly ever travel, and I never ride the elevator unless I absolutely have to. 

It’s not that I don’t want to travel. I really do want to go to places all over the country (and even the world). Unfortunately, I just can’t see myself flying alone or with someone who isn’t willing to physically push me through the jetway onto the airplane, and then endure my gorilla death grip around their wrist when the plane does anything remotely scary. In other words, my intense (and growing) fear of flying is the real reason why I didn’t go to the family reunion this weekend. There, I admitted it!