“How are you feeling?”

“Scared.”

“It’s a good kind of scary, right?” The taxi driver glanced back at me, unaware of the extreme anxiety bubbling at the pit of my stomach after starting my solo adventure in California. I was 20 and I’d never travelled alone, except a million times over and back in my head. Now, my dreams were a reality and ‘scared’ was an understatement of how I felt upon landing at LAX airport. The influencers on social media always make travelling solo look so easy. Navigating a new world on my own as well as the uncertainty of the future was too terrifying to comprehend never mind explain to a random taxi driver.

Fast forward six months: I was in tears saying goodbye to new friends and a familiar way of living, wishing I could do my semester abroad all over again. Travelling to new places and meeting new people became my ‘good kind of scary’. Since then, I’ve moved to Vietnam and lived there for over two years. Before I left, some Irish people gave a skeptical look when they asked “Who are you going with?” and my response was “Me!” Instead of wasting energy on worrying whether I’d be ‘Saoirse no friends’, that familiar feeling of fear was welcomed as soon as I stepped on the plane. I knew it meant new beginnings from positive change, and I was right.

There is ALWAYS so much fear and criticism in the world, and the media does a fantastic job at bringing us closer to it every day ⁠(as if a global pandemic wasn’t scary enough). I’m now apprehensive towards horror movies, reluctant with rollercoasters, and I hate speeding in vehicles ⁠— things that used to excite me as a teen while I embarrassingly screamed ‘YOLO’ with my friends. The real fears surrounding us are exhausting enough, so much so that I’m scared of things that aren’t really threats at all. Starting ANOTHER blog and actually sharing it with the world seemed ridiculously terrifying to me, until I realized taking a chance is ‘a good kind of scary’.

I’m going to chat about the positive ways we can challenge ourselves & the expected norms of society while including personal anecdotes and encounters with different individuals. Don’t worry, dressing up as a killer clown or setting frightening alarms won’t be recommendations. Whether it’s public speaking, wearing an unusual outfit, turning your phone off for a day or simply admitting your fears, there are tiny conscious steps we can take to be more confident and alive in this anti-social world so we stay true to ourselves.

If you want to travel somewhere or try something new, but the feeling of fear is stopping you. Remember, it could just be ‘a good kind of scary’.

-Saoirse