Lately, I’ve been struggling with this being, Courage. He keeps telling me “You can do it!” and “Step out of your comfort zone!” and in turn, I keep responding with “No, I can’t!” and “I don’t want to/You can’t make me!”

 
Fear, on the other hand—fear and I are pretty good buddies. He takes me out for drinks every Wednesday and then proceeds to remind me of everything I have coming up in the next five weeks.

And by all that, I mean I sit in my room, using my coffee maker to make pot after pot of tea, while Fear waves the ever-growing list of (poop expletive) I have to do in my face.

 
I’m on the brink of graduation (synonym for destruction?) and all these scary decisions I have yet to make are splayed out around me. It’s like Courage decided to play 52-Card Pick-Up: Choices Edition, and leave me scrambling to gather them—and my wits—together, while Fear just mucks everything up by showing his home movies of all the different ways I can fail at everything.

 
I change my mind; Fear’s the jerk, not Courage. And you know what? I’m tired of Fear’s game. As the great Mia Thermopolis once told me, “Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear.” You can’t say “The Princess Diaries” never taught you anything.

 
When you start worrying, that’s the time Fear likes to slither up and blow things out of proportion, turning a little garter snake into an eight-foot tall cobra with three heads that all shoot acid from their eyes. It’s then you need to stop and remind yourself that it won’t be the end of the world if things don’t go according to plan, that that mutant cobra really is only a garter snake.

 
Fear won’t go away, but if you gather up Courage, you’ll discover that Fear doesn’t rule you. So you can smack that crown right off his stupid little head and tell him he can suck it, because you’ve got more important things to focus on than him constantly whacking you on the head with his cobra-headed scepter and telling you you can’t do anything.

 
One of the main arguments I hear (and admittedly, have used on more than one occasion) that contributes to Fear becoming the overbearing monarch is that “adulting is hard.” What did we think it was going to be like? Frolicking through a field of wildflowers? Well, guess what? Those same pretty fields of wildflowers contain bees and bugs and floating pollen, so if you have allergies, you’re not in for a good time. That’s adulthood in a nutshell: flowers, bees and allergies.

 
Let’s face it; we are adults. So, we’ve got to stop whining about having to “adult,” and about how “adulting sucks, and I wanna be a child for the rest of my life and color outside of the lines with permanent markers, because screw the system, blah!”

 
We are adults, so what’s the point in lamenting about it? Just get (poop expletive) done!

 
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take my own advice. *aggressively attacks to-do list*