The Lemon Life | online magazine offering a fresh perspective on post-grad life.

Words by: Jamie Phillips

Image by: Leeay Aikawa (http://gallery.me.com/leeay#gallery)

The sort of fear I’ve experienced since graduation hasn’t been of the ‘legs are shaking, heart has leapt into my trachea because oh no, there’s a tiger chasing me’ variety. It has been the less malignant, nervous anxiety that typically presents during job interviews, final exams, or telling your conservative mother that you got a tattoo. It has been this way mostly because I’ve been doing things like going to job interviews. And as anyone wearing dress pants can tell you, the office environment has a serious dearth of adventure. On a scale from One to Freaked Right Out, I’d say my fear level has been hovering around a Two. To be sure, the Big Bad Recession stirs up a little trepidation, but compared to other countries (Icelandic riots anyone?) Canada could have it a lot worse. It also helps that I’m one of those irritating optimists that endures the downturns with thoughts of the inevitable upswing.

Thanks in part to almost negligible levels of fear (and thereby, excitement) my innate restlessness has begun gnashing its teeth again. Inspired and abetted by the freedom that having no direction affords, I recently decided to pursue a longstanding goal: traveling, alone, to South America for three months. By the time you read this, I will be sipping pisco sours in Lima and delighting in the Peruvian spring weather. It’s okay, I’d be jealous if I were you, too.

The thought of traveling alone (young woman, unfamiliar territory) definitely triggers a few heart palpitations. There is a multitude of ways this trip could go awry, from getting horribly lost to being robbed to suffering bodily injury, to name a few. Being thrust out of your comfort zone tends to make you more cognizant of the risks that you’re taking. And therein lies the appeal: branching out of my secure little bubble in order to experience something new.

Much of the fear we encounter stems from those opportunities that force us to step outside of our comfort zone. Evolutionarily speaking, a fear response is appropriate in unknown and potentially dangerous situations. And hurrah for that or we’d be one short lived species if we were completely fearless. However, operating solely on strictly adaptive responses is for invertebrates. Luckily, we have slightly more evolved grey matter, and thus, we can decide how we respond to fear. Shrivel like a mollusk, or don’t.

I read a poem once that intimated that the fear that drives us is not actually of failing. Rather, we are afraid of succeeding, of being talented and brilliant. Perhaps the author meant we don’t feel worthy of success, or that we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we achieved every goal.

Personally, I’ve reveled in the small triumphs I’ve had thus far and hopefully there’s more where that came from, but I am afraid of having retirement home regrets. ‘Death of a Salesman’ put the fear of god into me.

That is precisely why I’m getting on that plane. I have the opportunity, it freaks me out enough to be worth it, and I want to be able to reminisce when I’m old about the time I left everything behind, eschewed career responsibilities and explored another corner of the world.

Author Sarah Whitman states the impetus for my decision perfectly: I am propelled by that little monkey of yearning that never lets me know what it is, exactly, that I’m looking for (paraphrased from ‘Gods that smell like goats’). The unknown is frequently scary, but I’ll never find whatever it is that’s missing if let that trifling detail stop me.

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