I am scared of connection. The idea of making friends scares me. The idea of being alone scares me even more. The idea of being around people and still feeling lonely scares me the most, because I have felt that feeling, and it is the worst feeling that I know. The truth is that a lot of things scare me.
Here are some of my fears. I’m afraid that I’m not hot enough. I list this first because as a woman, the first and biggest fear is always a lack of fuckability. Or maybe that’s just me. I compare myself to the girls on Instagram, some of whom I know in real life, and I’m afraid that I don’t look like them. Even when I know that they don’t even look like them. Not really. They know their angles and they know their poses, and I am as envious as I am afraid. I know this isn’t very girls’ girl of me, but deep inside, I am still just an insecure thirteen-year-old girl with gangly limbs and a penchant for hunching my shoulders. My Grandma Babe used to say I’d have a hunched back by the time I was thirty. That’s only three years away now, and I’m afraid that I’m well on my way. I’m worried that I’m not thin enough, or tan enough, or my face is not proportional enough, and I sometimes wonder how anyone has looked at me and wanted all of this.
I’m afraid that I’m not doing this whole life thing right. I’m twenty-seven, and I haven’t left the country yet. I’ve never traveled to Prague or Spain or England or any of the places that my seventeen-year-old self, locked in a room watching snow fall in upstate New York, dreamt about going. I’ve never kissed anyone in Ibiza or skinny dipped in Barbados or done shrooms in Jamaica. I’m afraid that I’ve wasted my twenties. That the best years of my life are behind me, a sea of empty promises that I made to my seventeen-year-old self floating in the water like so much sea foam on waves. My passport is collecting dust in my closet. (This is a lie. I don’t even have a passport because I’m from a family where traveling past Highway 20 was never an option and because I’m scared of airplanes.)
I’m afraid that I don’t know where I want to go. I don’t have family anywhere except for shitty Nor-Cal nothing towns where the main export is either weed or meth or both, and I am sick to death with the college town that I’m in now, which ran out of intrigue exactly two years ago. I could go so many places, in theory. I could look for jobs in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Toronto, anywhere. But the world is so big, and I am so small, and I am swallowed by it all like a bottle sent into the ocean as I fill out my twentieth state job application of the week, wondering if I want to spend my life in a cubicle just so I can retire by sixty and then have time to write.
I’m afraid that the best years of my life are behind me. That there are no more wild nights and drunken laughter left ahead. That I’m old and used up at twenty-seven. When I mention this to anyone over the age of thirty-five, they laugh. They say the best years of my life haven't even begun. I guess that I have to believe them. The alternative is depressing. I write this in June 2025, as I am finally graduating from an MFA program that has burnt me down to the quick. My internal monologue is depressing, and only half-true.
Here is the truth. The truth is that I am a jealous creature by nature, so filled with envy that my hair should be tinged green. I am constantly envisioning greener grass, a life that is just beyond me, so close and yet forever unattainable. I look at all the girls that I knew from undergrad, who now live in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, cities that I’m not even sure if I want to live in, and I wonder if I’m doing everything wrong. I envy them for their decision to leave, to move on and find something new, even if they eventually regret it. At least they took the plunge. I envy their lack of indecision. I am also an indecisive creature by nature. Call this trait what you want. Call it anxiety. Call it childhood trauma. I call it fatherless behavior.
Here is the truth. The truth is that my dad died a year and a half ago. The truth is that when this happened, I calmly left the boba shop that I was in, and I walked over train tracks that reminded me of his end, and I watched Sex and The City until the sun went down. The truth is that when my best friend called to check on me, I didn’t have much to say. The truth is that I didn’t cry about it for nearly a year, and then I cried nearly every day for a month on the one year anniversary. The truth is that my boyfriend, a man that I met a mere two months after my dad died, held my trembling body in a hotel room with gray cement walls in San Francisco while I held back tears from watching the movie Coco during a trip we took to distract me from the anniversary. The truth is that I always imagine what it would be like for him to meet my dad. For my dad to be protective and not on meth and normal. For my boyfriend to win him over. I think of all the ways they are alike, their kindness, their big personalities, their loud laughs, and I ache.
The truth is that I’m sad. The truth is that I’m also in love. In love with the trees and the sky and the sun and the moon. In love with the wind in my face on my bike road home from work. In love with the arms that hold me at night. The same birthmark I trace each morning that we’re together, which is half the week. The truth is that we feel like good news. Like a message in a bottle, destined to find me. The truth is that I’m scared to say that too loudly, for fear of wrecking it all.
The truth is that I have so much gratitude in my heart, but so much envy and fear at the same time. The truth is that the last year has been one of the best of my life, and maybe that makes me a little sad. The truth is that the best years are ahead. The truth is that I am as young and as old as I have ever been. The truth is that I am right where I’m supposed to be. The truth is that I can do anything after this. I have seen the pit. I want to reach the peak. The truth is that I am, I am, I am.