Fear

My worst fear, though it may seem pathetic, is getting lost. I fear being alone in a foreign place and I fear not knowing where to place my next step. To me, being lost is like being in a state of utter helplessness. The people who I might want to reach won't know where I am and I won't know how to get to them. This combination of feeling isolated, confused, and powerless terrifies me. My embarrassingly terrible sense of direction is part of the reason I've developed this fear. I realized at summer camp in Washington DC that I could never go out by myself because I was afraid of not being able to figure out my way back to the dorms. A lot of the friends I made at camp thought of wandering aimlessly in a big city as an adventure, a puzzle to figure out a way back. But that perspective did not work for me. I died a little inside every time I thought I was lost and blindly followed my friends back to the dorms because their instincts always turned out to be more correct than mine... I think one thing that will help me get over this irrational fear when I'm actually in the situation is realizing that I'm not going to die and my loved ones will not move on and forget me because they can't find me.