my fear giant.

(Author’s Note: This post is actually a paper on the topic of “My Biggest Fear” that I turned in for my English class.)

I have an astronomical number of fears.

This number is so large, these fears so varying in degree, that I cannot even count them all, much less know what they all are just yet. Heights, spiders, death, loss, loneliness, speaking up, never being good enough, being seen as a disappointment—the list is simply too long.

But my greatest, inmost, most sizable fear giant, transcendental above all other fear giants of mine, is oblivion. Not achieving my goals or seizing my dreams in all their entirety. Failure (atychiphobia, to be more exact I suppose).

OBLIVION [uh–bliv-ee-uh n]: the state of being completely forgotten or unknown. I didn’t really know the definition of oblivion in these terms until I read the book The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. In this book, the main character, sixteen-year-old Hazel, who is terminally ill with thyroid cancer, attends a support group for cancer kids and meets there Augustus Waters, a seventeen-year-old, one-legged osteosarcoma survivor. During the meeting, when asked to share his fears with the group, Augustus says without missing a beat, “I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark” (12). Hazel, a pessimist by nature and, of course, situation, responds like this: “There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you.” She goes on to say a few more bleak phrases about the end of time, but she ends by saying, “And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it” (12-13).

I quote this powerful book to say that I, much like Augustus, fear oblivion. I fear people not remembering my name or what I accomplished, of fading away into the atmosphere like a plume of dust. I fear unaccomplished goals, of failing to make my wild dreams a reality, of living a supremely reclusive and unsatisfying life.

I know this all sounds kind of ridiculous. Most likely, a hundred years from now, people will have no earthly idea a girl named Hannah Roberts ever walked the planet, much less that I made some sort of impact worth remembering. But still after realizing the bitter truth, I hope that I do. I hope that I do something that makes some noise, that I make something of myself before my time runs out. I hope that I live a life that, in sixty years when I am gray and old and sitting in a nursing home, reflecting on every one of my endeavors, the memories bring a smile to my lips.

Until I actually sat down and thought about this post, I did not realize I had such fears. You see, for as long as I remember I have had high aspirations and enormous dreams far too heavy for my little head. And not accomplishing those dreams is something that is completely out of the question for me.

I am fiercely resolved not to waste my life. How will I follow through on this resolve, you ask? Well, it is simple: by living. By doing as Hazel said—ignoring the inevitability of human oblivion. By living a simply fantastic life because I have a choice to do so.

And I intend to.