I'm Afraid of Being Ordinary

When I was a kid, I thought I'd grow up to be someone important. An astronaut, a president, a Nobel Prize winner. Now I'm thirty-two, and my biggest achievement is remembering to take out the recycling on time. I'm terrified that this is it. That I'll spend forty more years in a cubicle, go home to a house I don't love, and die having never mattered. I know everyone feels this way sometimes. But knowing that doesn't make the fear any quieter. It whispers to me in the shower, in the middle of the night, in the quiet moments when there's nothing to distract me from the truth: I'm running out of time.