The worst case scenario.

I live a life a melodrama, of sharply contrasting emotions, which bump against each other angrily and repeatedly. I praise the things that make me joyous and make me laugh, eternally retelling stories of perfect moments until they are almost myths. They are on a pedestal: I look at them and wonder, sometimes, if they actually happened at all, or if I spoke their names too many times, and poof! They disappeared. I cry easily, complain about everything unjust, and live my life in a generally over-the-top manner. This is colour, this is texture, this is how I live.

And so, for me, this is the worst case scenario.

It is 2024 and I am thirty. Well. I am just shy of my thirtieth birthday, and have been adamantly avoiding it for so long that I have prematurely aged. My face looks thirty-three already. People have started making subtle comments that my looks will go soon. The pervasive sexism of young middle-age is yet to be perfectly eradicated.

Since graduating, I have had a couple of jobs but my itchy feet got in the way of my young ones. I spent sixth months as a magazine freelancer until they let me go, but the market was tough and I was getting desperate. In the end, I just took what I could get, grabbing with both hands for something I didn't really want. It was just a stop-gap, I told myself: something to get me by, until I could quit and go travelling and then start anew in a year.

A year passed. Then two, then three, and I still had not left my job. It is in an office in a respectable part of London and I work in marketing or publicity or as a sort-of job that crosses the two, and involves coming up with dynamic Twitter solutions. I have a 45-minute commute on the tubes every morning from my flat, but it's an okay place. It's not as shabby as my last two were. Once a week I go on dates, watching foreign language movies and strolling through the park and telling myself this isn't a bad life, really. I find myself lusting after the interns. They are so young, so full of potential. I want to devour them.

I don't write, really. Not any more. I'm too tired after working all day in things I couldn't care less about. I try to leave, sometimes, but it's so hard. Somehow I am stuck, and responsible. The last place I went on holiday was Venice, with my then-lover. We argued the whole weekend, and I came home with only a handful of photos and a brooding sense of resentment. I look at the tattoos I got while young with a sense of detachment. They feel like someone else's. That can't have been me. I would never spend £200 on ink and pain; that could get me a nice pair of shoes, or earrings.

It's not a bad life, this corporate drudgery and complete obedience to the status quo, with nothing unexpected and no adventures. There is no melodrama, and I watch as my friends from university get pregnant and married and divorced, fired and evicted and transatlantically job-shifted, and I tell myself the stability is everything I need. It's not ideal, but it's... not bad.

But it is the worst case scenario.

I am scared of everything.

I know I haven’t been around for very long. Eighteen years is nothing. The universe has been around for billions of years. I am less than a blink of the grand celestial eye. I am like, a millionth of a blink. A billionth. I am such a small part of something so big that the numbers make the mind boggle. I am so insignificant that it’s a wonder I write anything, or that you read it, because none of it matters – not really. None of this is going to change the world.

But why should you trust what I have to say? I, after all, am nobody. I don’t even trust what I say, and I’m the one spewing this shit twenty-four hours a day.

The one thing I am sure of is this: we are all scared. We are scared of losing what we love, or not realising we love it until it’s too late. We are scared of the future, of the past, of having life fuck up, of having it turn out exactly the way we want it to.

We are scared of disappointment. Disappointing ourselves, our friends, our families. We are scared of the fact we are scared. We are scared we don’t love ourselves enough, that we love ourselves too much, that we don’t listen enough or talk enough or think enough. We are scared of things that contradict each other. We are scared into paradoxes of fear, where any decision could be the wrong one. We get too scared to even make decisions sometimes, and end up just playing Temple Run 2 for hours on end because it’s easier than doing something and getting it wrong.

And anyone who isn’t scared is a liar. We should all admit it. I’m scared of you, reading this right now. I'm scared you'll think my writing is so pathetically mediocre that you've wasted your life by reading it. I'm scared you'll troll me, or leave some perfectly articulated criticism that perfectly describes why I hate my own writing; I'm scared you'll say something that cuts so deep it makes me never want to write again. I'm scared nobody will read this and it'll all be pointless, and I'll essentially be yelling into the night forever with nobody even pretending to listen.

I'm scared of the people I love and what they think of me, and what they would think of me if they knew about the horrible thoughts that live inside my head. I'm scared of my plans for the future - what if I'm wishing for all the wrong things? What if I achieve my dreams - then what? What if my dreams are actually really disappointing? What if I love the wrong people and do the wrong things? I have nobody to blame but myself.

I'm scared of going blind! I have no logical reason to be scared of going blind! But what if one day I wake up and boom, my retinas have detatched and dissolved into the jelly of my eyes, and I can't see ever again? And going deaf! I'm scared of that too! What if, one day, I can't hear music anymore? WHAT IF I LOSE ALL SENSORY EXPERIENCE AND CAN NO LONGER EMPIRICALLY PROVE ANYTHING. WHAT THEN?

In fact, I'm scared of pretty much everything. Autonomy is a big scary thing and being in charge of our choices is also big and scary. But when I get really, really scared, I go outside at night and look at the stars – or, really, Google Sky, because England is too fucking cloudy all the time to see the stars – and I remind myself that I can fuck up. I can fuck up so many times that there is nothing left in my life that I haven't fucked up. Literally everyone in the world could hate me. And it wouldn’t matter, because those stars are going to keep shining*. Nothing I can do is going to affect them. The universe is still going to be there. And it’ll be scary, but there will always be the chance to strike out into the world again. We are all under the same sky; those stars remind me that I always have a second chance.

*(Unless you’re The Doctor. In which case, you fucking up really COULD destroy the universe, so I recommend exercising caution. You do you, Doctor..)