Many people have irrational fears such as spiders, snakes, sharks or the dark. These things, I agree, can be quite scary, yet all of these fears are something both avoidable and removable. The stomp of a foot and the hit of shovel can respectively rid most spiders and snakes that any of us will ever encounter. Sharks can be avoided by not swimming in too deep of ocean waters. The dark can disappear with the flip of a switch. But what happens when you have a severe fear of something you know over which you have no control? What is the point in wasting such powerful emotions on something you know you cannot change? My fear of death is something that truly knocks the breath out of my lungs. For an unknown reason, I noticed that as I aged and became overall a more knowledgeable person, I became increasingly scared of dying. When the thought of death is brought to my attention, I am overtaken by the whole concept. I soon realized that this was more than just the average irrational fear. Even the slight thought of what death is makes my heart race, makes my hands sweat and puts me in a state of hyperventilation. I am truly unable to wrap my brain around the idea of death and the fact that one day I will encounter this horrible phenomenon and I may not even know it or see it coming.

Sitting through AP Environmental Science every other day in school does not make matters easier. Not only is this class solely about how humans have so intensely degraded our planet, it discusses all the ways in which humans are expediting the death of the Earth. This negative information has left me with nothing less than paranoia. Which, by the way, reminds me to caution you all to not eat tuna as the radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 has just reached our ocean waters, and the tuna that we eat has collected large radiation sums. Maybe not being so knowledgeable and instead more naïve about our declining planet would leave me with only happy thoughts. The more information you know, the more negative things you discover. Is it worth knowing so much if you are one prone to live in fear? No one says it better than Daisy Buchanan, “—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”