The other day while I was driving, I began to think about the future for the first time in quite a while.
After I was told I was cancer-free and I wouldn’t have to go back to the hospital anymore for routine checkups, I found myself avoiding any thought toward the future and what it could be. I didn’t want to think of what could happen and who might walk out on me, so I made a pact with myself that day: I wouldn’t give any thought to the future and if someone asks me about it, I won’t have an answer for them.
As my college career is drawing to an end this year, I have found that the question of the future is coming up quite frequently. My professors and employers that I interview with want to know where I see myself in 5 years. Even my family has been asking me the question. Everyone seems to want to know what I envision the rest of my life to be, while I have put off thinking about it since I was 18 years old because of the fear of what might happen. Any cancer survivor understands the fear of it all coming back. This is something that I still fight with every day. It is not always in the back of my mind, but it appears in fragments. It comes back to taunt me when I’m sick, when an important event is coming up, or even in the relationships that I have.
That fear likes to torment me. It likes to make me think that I shouldn’t look towards the future because something bad could happen. It tells me that I should just see gloom and doom 24/7, trying to remind me of life’s unpredictability in the past.
But, I felt differently towards the idea of it when I was in the car. That morning, my professor made us fill out a document that asked us what we wanted in the future for ourselves. I hemmed and hawed over what to say, the pen in my hand didn’t know what to write. There was that question again. After a few minutes of thinking, my brain told me what to write on that paper, without a moment more of hesitation. To be happy, looking forward and looking toward. I had no doubt in what I put. I wasn’t kidding myself and while the fear in the back of my mind tried to fight its way in, it didn’t.
I continued to say this in my head. It was a newly found mantra, something I will hold onto. I will take it in stride. I want those who are struggling to know that the future, while it is something that we can’t predict or entirely know, doesn’t have to be an ache in the soul. If we look forward and towards what life has to offer us, there is no limit to what we can achieve. Fear is a part of life but we cannot allow it to be all of it. Fear reminds us that we have something to lose but also something to live for. No longer will I fear what lies ahead, but rather I will embrace what life has to offer me. There has been good and bad in my life but, I survived.
I will keep on looking forward and looking toward.