Halfway through eating a bowl of ramen noodles, I always wish I hadn’t started eating a bowl of ramen noodles.

I’m a junior in college. I’m halfway through my junior year, actually. That thought terrifies me sometimes. I’ve always had a little bit of a Peter Pan complex. I had a midlife crisis when I turned eighteen. I’m serious. I had a complete conniption over the fact that I was technically an adult and I hadn’t accomplished anything I wanted to accomplish and all sorts of stuff like that. Of course, since I was only eighteen, no one took me seriously. 

Anyway, I’ve always had a few base fears. There’s spiders, for one. I’m terrified. It’s awful. I see a picture of a spider and I’m frozen in fear. I hate them too. I see one in my house, and the first thought in my head is: That bastard has to die! Because what if it doesn’t? If you see one and you don’t kill it, that means it’s freely roaming your house somewhere, and it’s probably using all that time to plan it’s attack! And it will attack! Spiders have been planning a hostile take over for years. Until the public accepts this truth and chooses to act, we are all at risk.

That’s really beside the point though.

The point is this: all I want from life is to travel the world. I want to see new places. I want to meet people. I want to eat food, and experience life at all spectrums. I’ve always wanted to travel, ever since I was a little girl. I want to help people and make a difference, and I want it so bad, I can barely breath sometimes. I am so scared that one day, I’m going to wake up at forty years old, have a desk job, a house, a dog, a family, and I won’t have experienced my dream. It terrifies me, because it’s happened to so many people. I don’t want to settle! I’ve been saving up money, and I’m planning on going after I graduate college. I’ll have a major in Anthropology and a minor in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) so I might be able to get jobs teaching English. 

There are so many things that try to stand in the way. Traveling costs money. There’s no guarantee that once I’m abroad somewhere, I’ll be able to make money. Then there’s the safety issue. I would be completely fine backpacking, but it’s not exactly safe for a girl to backpack alone. It’s rather unfair, but it’s true. I have to be practical about this. I frequently fantasize about just buying a plane ticket in the middle of the semester and saying fair thee well to the life I’ve been waiting to leave behind for years. There’s an entire world out there after all! Why settle for the tiny one percent you live in?

I won’t let anything stand in the way of this for me. This is what I want more than anything else. I don’t want the house, the pets, the car. Eventually I want a family, but I want it with the travel. I’m terrified of failing in this. Hopefully that fear will keep spurring me on.