There’s a feeling I’ve been wrestling with lately, and I’m not even sure what to call it. My friend has been feeling it too. It’s a strange knot in the stomach, somewhere between fear and anticipation, and it kept following us through the last weeks of our Industrial Training (IT).
Our IT itself had been… fine. Smooth, even. The only problem was that we weren’t learning much, not exactly the kind of professional or educational growth we had imagined before starting. But we had also imagined a stress-free IT, and we had that. So we kept going, some days happy that we had time for side hustles, and some days worried that we weren’t learning.
But then, we began to be more worried when we realized that we had skipped a few important steps the school required. We didn’t submit our forms on time, didn’t go for the signature and stamp visits to the Industrial Training Fund (ITF), not once, not twice, but we missed all three visits.
Also, our director had been delaying signing our logbooks and giving them back to us. I believed she did this because she wanted us to stay for another seven days.
That’s when the “feeling” began, the endless what-ifs.
What if she keeps delaying signing our logbooks?
What if someone at the ITF rejects our forms and logbook?
What if all our IT weeks suddenly didn’t count?
*The 14th of August was the deadline, and we weren’t moving ahead.*
We imagined every possible negative outcome. And somehow, the more we imagined the more real the fears become.
Then yesterday, I decided to put more pressure on our director and she sent someone over to return our logbooks today. We then left immediately for the ITF office.
My heart was thudding. I was scared and I knew my friend was too, but we kept laughing at little things to distract ourselves from the pressure in our minds.
When we reached the ITF office, the atmosphere was much more relaxing than we had thought. No one questioned us. The logbooks were signed without a single raised eyebrow. The same went for the signing at the school campus. What happened to all the strict warnings I heard they gave us at the orientation?
All the stamping and signing were over before we even processed them in our head.
We looked at each other and laughed, not just because we were relieved but because all our dramatic imaginations had been wrong.
It made me wonder how many times in life do we ruin our own peace with worst-case scenarios that never happen? How often is the fear intense than the actual event?
Maybe that’s the name of the feeling, *fear dressed up as certainty.* And maybe reality, every now and then just loves to surprise us.
I am actually very grateful because in as much as this went well, there’s a possibility it could have also gone badly if it weren’t simple people that were attending to us. Also, I haven’t taken this for granted. I told my friend on our way home that I would be a changed person next semester. I would do everything on time and avoid things that get me overly stressed and worried. But she laughed because to her, it isn’t the first time I’ve said something like that. But I mean it this time.
So, have you ever spent days worrying about something, only for it to turn out far better than you expected?
Because I actually believe in the fact that most of us live in our heads. We suffer more in our heads, imagining situations and scenarios, both the good and the bad ones. Sometimes it gets to the extent that we begin to derive comfort in our imagination. We also create fear for the unknown and carry it into reality, but at the end of the day our reality turns out far better. Sometimes also, we imagine a good and blissful life but the reality turns out differently.
That is a reminder that we are humans, we are supposed to do what we can and let nature play its part. Being overly worried about what we don’t have any control over is something we could all reconsider.
Images are mine.