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..)

How am I supposed to leave?

We all have to leave sometime.

I have lived in this village for as long as I can remember. It is too small to have a train station, and the buses to the nearest towns only come once an hour. It is big enough to get lost in, but I haven’t for a long time. I have lived here for seventeen years and I don’t know the names of most of the roads. Once, on the day of my first driving lesson, my instructor asked me where Fish Street was.

Fish Street? No, I don’t know Fish Street; it’s The Common, which changes names halfway down for no apparent reason. It’s the little curved apostrophe of a road where all the terraced houses have window-boxes full of cheerful pink carnations, and cars parked in front with two wheels up on the pavement. It’s a road I can describe with my eyes closed, but I’d never paid any attention to its name. I saw the road name on a sign every day, and it was so obvious that I never noticed it.

When someone says “home” to me, I think of the High Street in the summer, when hanging baskets adorn every lamppost and shop front, suspended on fragile chains beside the door of the chemist or the chiropractors’, and the whole street smells like a garden centre. Home is the gravel path of the church I used to walk up every week as a child, before my creeping antipathy for religion rendered me an atheist. My mother still walks that path every Sunday, and the nave is where we sat the last time we said goodbye to her own mother. It’s a safe place for her.

There’s the bench next to the needle of the war memorial, the criss-crossed paths cutting across the Common that are surrounded by a canopy of trees, the cratered road my childhood best friend lived at the other end of. Driving down her road was an exercise in how to ruin your car’s suspension and her parents always used to mutter darkly about how extortionate it would be to repave it. But I loved it, and loved how running over the bumpy surface could make it feel like you were flying, never quite sure where your legs would land.

My hometown is affluent, a microcosm of suburban paradise where children play in the river and climb trees, and where my elderly neighbours still stroll with impunity. The worst thing that’s ever happened to me here was when I got honked at by a passing car when I was walking home from the shops at age fifteen; it’s that sort of place.

And with each day that passes, I get closer to leaving it. I’ll be flying the nest. I don’t yet know where I’ll be going, but it’ll be two hundred miles away or more. I won’t be living in a place where I can go for a walk at 2am, on my own, and feel utterly unfazed. I’m excited for the city, for the new people, for a room that is mine and a place where I get to be someone new. My village is dull, but it's safe. It won't surprise me or hurt me. It seems inconceivable this place could ever change: it's going to be the same forever. I know I've outgrown it.

But I’ll miss this. I’ll miss holding open the door of the post office while a pensioner closes her umbrella and we share a knowing smile about the weather. I’ll miss the white gates of my house and the feeling of being anchored, to a specific place in a specific moment of time. I suppose that moment is coming to an end, and something new is about to start.

I don’t want to go. I can’t wait to move away. I could stay here forever. We all have to leave sometime.