For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had an abundance of irrational fears.

I describe planes as large metal coffins suspended in the sky at the will of an untrustworthy pilot, I’ll take five flights of stairs instead of a “suspicious” looking elevator in the blink of an eye and I still haven’t ruled out the possibility that ghosts are haunting my house.

Yet above all of these perplexing anxieties, there is only one fear that has the power to truly dictate my life.

Failure.

On some level, I think everyone is afraid of failure. In the midst of our industrial, productivity-oriented society, we have all become intoxicated with the idea that our value is derived from our success relative to others. Self worth has become encompassed by numbers: test grades, GPAs and ACT scores. Competition dictates every aspect of our lives, and if you don’t end up on top, you’re deemed unworthy.

It’s no wonder that this kind of environment has cultivated a crippling fear of failure.

Naturally, it seems as though my purpose in life is to focus every fiber of my being on productivity to achieve success. I am chained to a weight of competition, and because of that, I have taught myself winning is everything and losing means that I am nothing.

Even with my attempts to stay positive, this toxic mindset has infiltrated every aspect of my life. Losing one debate round can make me feel worthless, a poor grade on a test can throw my mood in the trash for a week and ACT stress deprives me of sleep. Fear of failure has given me tunnel vision. I can no longer see positives in my life, only the negatives. I am either always first, or I am wholly irrelevant. There is no in between, no compromise. There is only a fear of failure.

While striving to succeed can be seen as motivational, the extent to which it is engrained in our society today is neither comforting nor encouraging, but rather harmful and dangerous. Allowing your identity to be attached to your success in life will never give you happiness because there will always be someone who beats you in that final round, or who gets one more question right on that test.

So what’s the antidote? In a way, I think the only solution is to realize our irrelevance. In reality, I am nothing but a speck in the universe, and no one will ever remember the grade I get on my math test tomorrow. I’m trying to correct this narrow mindset and learn that I can still be happy without straight A’s, without being the best in everything that I do.

I’m trying to overcome this fear.