Eventually, of course, I grew up, and those fears went away. But the fun thing about fears is that they’re easily replaced with a bunch of new fears that are just as believable and overwhelming. Don’t drive a car faster than 10 mph, because you will crash and we won’t even be able to identify your body. Don’t drink alcohol before you’re twenty-one, or your liver will tell your brain to become an alcoholic, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in rehab, where they don’t even get all the TV channels. Don’t get on airplanes because airplanes are the number-one travel method of terrorists, and if the terrorists don’t kill you, it doesn’t even matter, because the plane is gonna crash on its own anyway.

It’s a miracle I make it outside of the house at all.

So here we are. I’m now twenty-six, which is the age at which people start to assess whether you have your shit together, or at least whether you have the mental and physical capacity for one day getting your shit together. It’s the age at which people start categorizing your laziness as less of an endearing quirk and more of a problem the government will have to solve one day. It’s when people start to wonder how long you really have before shit goes entirely off the rails and you end up as one of those people on the evening news who managed to live unnoticed in the basement of a Staten Island Burger King, and when the reporter asks you why you’ve been living down here all these years, you ramble about trampolines and snow days and Michael Jackson and a demon clown.

It’s the age at which you should know what the fuck you’re doing, regardless of how much the world fucked you up.

And yet, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t date. I don’t drive. I don’t eat right. I don’t exercise. I don’t cook. I don’t clean. I don’t know how to dress myself. And I can’t remember where I left my remote, which should be the least of my concerns, but somehow it’s the most upsetting.