Coming to Terms with Fear: A Semester in the Life
The fifteen-minute walk from the subway each evening is intimidating, especially when it’s already dark out, and each evening I’m sure to walk quickly, keep my head down, and my keys tucked between my knuckles, just in case. Most days, I wish I was brave enough to not be intimidated by the men walking towards me or not flinch when somebody yells, but I can own to the fact that I’m still terrified of becoming a victim, like I’ve constantly heard about on the news.
Most days, the walk home is just fine — tolerable, but today has been an especially good day. Today, I’m thinking about how despite having a great relationship with both of my parents, it sometimes feels as though there’s so many things I never bothered to ask them. Whether it be how my grandmother use to be very abusive towards my mother or how my father was terrified of contracting AIDS during the 1990’s, it feels like I’m still discovering entire worlds that existed before I was ever thought of. Today, I’m feeling excited about the work I do as a student and the work that is still to come. I don’t feel the need to rush back to my place and take my time
as I watch the sun set over the Kings County Hospital.
Today was the culmination of over a year and a half of bad thoughts, of indecision, of being unsure of how the decisions I make now would impact my own future. I had started college as a music major and this afternoon, I changed it to something I felt that I really wanted to pursue: a double major in English and Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. Sometimes it feels silly to have made such a huge deal about something a majority of college students do (and by extension, to be writing a paper about it), but I knew that my decision wasn’t just a simple major change.
When I changed my major, I was confronting fear and anxiety I had been putting off for so long. Anxiety has always made me feel like the sun wouldn’t rise in the morning and had been an integral part of my life for years. With one click of a button on my laptop, it feels like I’ve changed the course of the rest of my life, and for a small moment, I don’t feel so scared anymore.
It feels like I’m letting go; letting go of one dream that had constantly made me angry, made me upset, made me feel like I would never measure up, and moving on to another dream that I could never really admit was there in the first place. My parents have felt fear for so long, and while it is still lurking at the back of my brain, I don’t feel so scared or anxious for a small second.
I walk up the stairs to my apartment, call my father, and we have the conversation we have most days: Hi, how are you? How was your day? Sorry, mami, I have to head back to work, I love you, bendicion. I tell him that today has been a good day, but I don’t tell him that the future no longer feels like a black hole. Maybe I will someday. For now, I decided to go to bed. Anxiety usually makes me feel like the sun won’t rise in the morning, but today it does not. The sun is coming out and a new day will be here soon.
