I don't know how else to say this, so I'll just say everything.

Last week S and I were eating breakfast when I asked her, "Do you ever just get scared sometimes?"

S gave me a weird look. "No."

We went back to eating in silence, me kicking myself for having broached the subject. Five minutes later she asked, "So do you ever just get scared sometimes?"

"Well, yeah. Sometimes."

Then she wanted me to explain to her what exactly got me scared sometimes and of course it's not something you can explain to someone who has no idea what you're talking about. Because it sounds silly. It's the mental equivalent of a kid imagining monsters under the bed and building a fortress of pillows or sleeping curled up in a ball so your toes don't get nibbled off. (Which was me, by the way--even now I don't think I can sleep with my feet peeking out under the blanket. It started out as a fear that became a weird compulsion to protect my feet.)

I'm more or less afraid of my imagination, because that's the only thing, really, that I can attribute my weird moods to. Sometimes I feel way overwhelmed by everything-- and when I say everything I mean everything. My entire life. I'm scared about how I'm going to navigate college, what I'm going to do after college, what I'm going to do about my dreams, how I'm going to support my family, how I can make them happy and make me happy. I know what I want in life, or at least I think I do. I'm terrified of not getting it. And I know there's a very very good chance I won't be able to live up to all the expectations because logically speaking, the expectations are a little impossible.

So I told S that I was afraid of everything, basically, and then I asked her what she wanted in life. She wants to get through this week. Okay, I said, but your life in general, do you have goals, do you have dreams? So she thinks and says, I want a good job with good pay that I'll enjoy doing. She has a happy family that supports her, she has her boyfriend coming over from Italy to marry her, she wants a good job. And she doesn't seem worried at all.

It can be this easy, I know it can be this easy. I just don't know how to get there.

It's hard for me to see things clearly, in perfect perspective, because I still can't shake the nagging feeling that I am a failure. I didn't think about my feelings since I came to college because oh hey, shaky territory; but once I let in those thoughts, the old feelings rushed up to choke me again. They'd choked me up before, in high school. I grew up thinking I was invincible and could be whatever I wanted because I was amazing and smart and ambitious and in high school everything came crashing down when I realized that no, I wasn't, I really wasn't. I'm normal and I'm going to lead a normal life.

For a while I blamed my parents for it all because hey, way to raise a healthy, well-adjusted child: telling her she was going to be great and famous and Someone Important, the one child who was going to validate her parents' years of sacrifice. Then what happens if she's not? What can she possibly do then, when she's failed at everything?

My greatest fear is that I don't deserve to live and everything I do ultimately spirals back to that. You're always your own harshest critic is something I practice with a vengeance. I'm scared to death that I won't be able to justify being alive. I've always pictured my life as a choice between glory or failure, that crucial difference between life or death. I can be a success or a failure; I can be alive or dead. There is no in-between. I want to win so much it aches, I want to win so much it terrifies me that I won't--but I can't imagine a life where I don't.

So sometimes the pressure gets to me. I can't disengage from it, I can't say This is life and it will turn out okay. Okay means I lost. I keep telling myself, If I do this and this and this then I'll be happy, it will all be worth it, I can live, I can live. But oh God, I don't even know what winning means, much less how to get there, and it's all just a jumble of insane hopes and half-formed wishes and anything and everything that will make my parents and me happy; and underneath it all there's that voice telling me that I've lost, I'm going to lose: see, I couldn't do it. It's terrifying because the noose around my neck is tightening with each year that passes, each expectation that I can't live up to, each thing that I fail to do. It's only a matter of time; sooner or later I'll be left swinging.