If you asked me what scares me right now, I might say snakes or worms. I’d probably laugh and even add ghosts, or any fear you can name, picture, and outrun.

But if you asked me at 3 a.m., with beer in our hands and the world already asleep, I would admit something heavier. With slightly trembling lips, I’d confess that I share the same fear Sylvia Plath once wrote about: “The idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”

At 24, there are days when I wonder if I’ve taken the wrong path. If I’ll never succeed. If I’ll never reach the life I once carefully planned and shamelessly dreamed about.

I wonder if it’s possible to be called smart and promising when you’re young, only to slowly blend into a life that fades without anyone noticing. Unobserved. Unremarked. Eventually, useless.

When I think about my younger self, the one who believed she could do anything, I wonder if she would recognize me now.

I looked back at the photographs, the medals, the certificates, and my hands began to shake. I can hardly meet her eyes in those pictures, the way they twinkled with certainty, the way she believed in me without hesitation. Sometimes I wonder if I’m disappointing her.

There are days I want to sit beside her, press her favorite candies into her small hands, and tell her to leave room for failure. To not dream quite so high. To soften the sharp edges of her expectations. To want a little less, so it would hurt a little less.

It feels shameful to even think that way.

At night, I wonder if everyone feels this at 24, or if I am simply too aware of time, of how quickly days turn into months and months into years. I move through life in such a rush that I forget to be grateful for what I already have. I forget to sit with it. I forget to breathe. I am always running, always thinking ahead, measuring my worth against a future that hasn’t even arrived.

People tell me, “Bata ka pa (You’re still young).” As if youth is a comfort. As if it guarantees something.

What they don’t understand is that I am afraid of being young. Afraid of believing I have all the time in the world, only to wake up one day and realize my life has quietly settled into something ordinary. Something safe. Something painfully mediocre.

I do not hate it for everyone. But I know for sure I will hate it for me—if I quietly fade, well-educated and once brilliantly promising, only to live a life that no one notices. As I write this, I can almost see Sylvia Plath looking at me, a smirk playing across her lips, as if daring me not to live her fear. I can almost imagine her voice saying what everyone always says: “You still have time.”

But do I?