My snakes

I have always been afraid of snakes.

The first nightmare I remember is one where my family and I got thrown into a pit of snakes, and it all pretty much just grew from there.

When I was younger, it wasn’t that bad. I was afraid of them, but the fear didn’t stop me from doing things.

As I’ve gotten older, the fear has grown and manifested into almost a phobia. I avoid certain streets when I hear that a snake has been spotted there. Literally just last week, someone saw a small garden snake in Humphreys, and it turned out that snake slithered out of Humphreys and outside into who knows where. So what do I do, since Jonas and Humphreys are next door to each other? I have a friend walk me to Jonas.

The logical part of me realizes that it is just a garden snake, and that it is harmless. Yet the rest of me just thinks about how it moves and its slithery texture, and I literally shake from the fear.

I realized that the same thing has happened with the other fears in my life.

I, very naïvely, want to change the world. To have some kind of an impact, that’s why I thought civil engineering was the perfect fit for me. Yet, I think that I’m not good enough or smart enough or creative enough to design unique and innovative solutions to the world’s environmental problems. Instead, I fear that I will be stuck in some job that I hate, working on projects that don’t inspire me, projects that do the exact opposite of what I want to do. Yet you have to pay the bills, and you can’t just leave to pursue an unknown career.

More than anything, I want to see the world. My ideal life would be to travel the world and write — write about my travels, my adventures, or just stories I make up. Yet, that kind of life, as wonderful as it seems, is also filled with the unknown. Not to mention, it’s unstable. Not to mention, it would bring complete disappointment to my family. So I fear that I will never get to have adventures, and that I will never see the world. All the responsibilities overwhelm me and instead the fear paralyzes me into staying where I am.

I have always been super close to my family. Sometimes I think too close. And it’s not the kind of close that they know every single small thing about me. Just the kind of close that we always spend time together; I guess I have always been a homebody. So now that I’m older and want to have experiences on my own, it makes that a bit harder. I almost have to get approval from my family to do something instead of going to see them. My little four-year-old sister makes it hard to stay away, anyway. I couldn’t imagine moving away and not being around for her. Even so, I don’t want to look back on my twenties and see me only being at home.

These are only some of my fears. I guess you could say that I overanalyze things, so much so that the next thing I know, I find myself in a pit of snakes. The pit is so full of snakes that I can’t even scream out for help. I guess that’s why I keep myself so busy — you can’t find yourself in a pit if you never stop to look.

Now, I didn’t write this to say I have a solution, that I have figured out how to fight my fears. I just wanted to know that I’m not the only one afraid of… snakes.