Astronauts experience three times the gravity of Earth upon liftoff. Under this increased pressure, fluid weighs more, and the heart has to pump faster to deliver blood to the brain. Even with training in increased gravity simulators, special flight suits, and seats that keep their bodies in the prone position, the crew risks fainting.

Deep-sea divers, too, experience heavy pressure. As they descend below the waves, they stop at increments to allow their body to gradually adjust. Below certain depths, divers require special equipment and breathe gas formulations to avoid hyperoxia, a toxic and potentially deadly condition that occurs at higher atmospheric pressure, when there is too much oxygen absorbed into body tissues. The body is a system in precarious balance, and activities like diving and spaceflight can threaten that balance.

Divers have to take precautions because the body doesn’t have much tolerance for pressure. Staying alive is more difficult underwater, and they train in order to prime their bodies for these harsh conditions. There are mechanisms in place: the special gas blends, the decompression stops, even decompression chambers that are used in emergencies when divers ascend too fast. The astronauts train, too. Simulators help their bodies acclimate to the g-forces of lift off, but even then, an astronaut’s heart must work harder to maintain the status quo. The body is working harder to stay alive.

I’m sitting in a leather chair across from my therapist in his office. No windows, just a few dim lamps with warm, amber light. No LEDs here. He slouches across his chair, one leg bent over the other, the way teenage girls always sit when they’re in a basement gossiping. It doesn’t look comfortable.

Anxiety is a bit of a mystery. It has something to do with neurotransmitters, and sometimes symptoms disappear or dissipate when patients take an SSRI (a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, for the uninitiated). I take sertraline. It works well enough. But I don’t want to rely on pharmaceuticals just to maintain a level head, and so I come to Dr. Miller to learn how to cope with anxiety.

Patients diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder struggle with catastrophizing. Certain events or thoughts prompt irrational reactions, and spark a train of hypothetical questions answered by worst-case scenarios. Dr. Miller had me keep a log of these chains so that I could see how irrational my habits were.

Once, I was supposed to meet a friend for coffee. We had made plans and I arrived at the café ten minutes early. She was late. At first, ten minutes. Then thirty. My mug was empty, so I left the shop and paced up and down the street in the brisk night air. I checked her Twitter. Nothing. I checked her Instagram. Nothing. I checked my text messages about twelve times a minute. Still nothing, not even the reassuring read receipt.

I went home, and still no answer. I considered calling her friend, the one who didn’t particularly like me in the first place, to see if she had heard from my coffee date in the past hour or so. I checked all the news sources, certain that she must have been in a horrible car accident on the way. I tried to find a police scanner, because maybe the news would have ignored a deadly car crash. Those happen all the time, right? They don’t matter until they strike someone you know. On my couch, my legs bounced up and down and my heart raced and I tried to sit still and ignore the sweat on my forehead and my shaking fingers. My friend offered to pack a bowl to ease my escalating neuroticism. And then my phone lit up with a cheerful tone.

“Hey, so sorry. I was on the phone with my grandfather.” Well then. She wasn’t dead in a fiery car crash.

This sort of event, this irrational feeling of terror, has happened before. When my father is late coming home from the airport, I check the news to see if there have been any plane crashes. When I have a headache, I check WebMD for signs of a brain tumor. The stress of day to day living taxes my nervous system more than it should. An average event causes my mind to catastrophize and my heart to beat harder. For a person with anxiety, it’s hard work to deal with the status quo, and it’s hard work to stay alive.

NASA astronauts have some of the most stringent qualifications of any career program. They’re required to have good blood pressure and vision that can be corrected to 20/20 acuity. They must fall within a certain height range, and have spent a thousand hours as piloting jet aircraft. They’re required both to be in top physical condition and to be scientists (in 1964, the program even required a doctoral degree).

After fulfilling these basic requirements, astronauts train for upwards of two years before they are even considered for space flight. Before they fly (they’re required to fly fifteen hours per month in NASA’s fleet of jet aircraft), candidates undergo the military’s underwater survival training and become SCUBA certified. Turns out, the outer reaches of the atmosphere and the depths of the sea are pretty similar when it comes to harsh environments for humans.

Catastrophe plagues space flight. After a series of high-profile explosions, including the death of a Virgin Galactic test pilot, an article in Bloomberg Businessweek noted that if airplanes crashed as often as shuttles did, there would be 272 wrecks per day in the United States alone. I don’t think my inclination to check on my father’s flight status would be unwarranted in that scenario.

Diving, too, has dealt with its share of disaster. Divers who ascend too quickly endure the “bends,” when nitrogen bubbles form in the bloodstream. Those afflicted can die if not transferred to a hyperbaric chamber as soon as possible. Even then, they can suffer long term brain damage.

But both the astronauts and the divers undergo training and learn protocols and safety measures. They know how to react when a mission goes awry. Presumably, neither astronauts nor divers spend time catastrophizing while they leave the atmosphere or delve into the depths. It would be fatal to do so.

Sessions with Dr. Miller are sort of like emotional training; boot camp for the anxious. After presenting him with my log of panic-inducing events, he explains the necessity to counter these initial reactions. I need to train my brain to avoid irrationality, he tells me, and prevent that debilitating doom. Instead of assuming my father’s aircraft is lying mangled in a field somewhere between Chicago and Minneapolis, I need to remember that 99.9998% of flights are incident-free. Instead of worrying that my friend is wrapped around the trunk of a tree, I need to relax and be patient and smoke some pot and see what’s on Netflix. I need to train myself to take the driver’s seat and stay rational, but it’s not easy.

Soon, I’ll walk across a stage in a black gown and receive my diploma (at least, I hope I will — one of the triggers on my log was the concern that I had messed something up and wouldn’t graduate after all). College graduation is the last of the rites of passage that have come in rapid succession since adolescence: driver’s license, 18th birthday, high school graduation, 21st birthday, et cetera. I have a hunch that the store is called Forever 21 because a lot of people would like to hit pause after 21 and stay that age forever, or at the very least, take a little bit more time to figure out what happens next. Life is accelerating; life is pinning us to our seats and stacking the pressure on our chests.

Like many of my peers, I don’t know what I’ll do after I walk across that stage.

One of the biggest disappointments of my early adult life has been the realization that there is never enough time to accomplish everything. As we grow up, we inherit a lesson, one of the elements of the American Dream: if you just work hard enough, you can achieve anything. Or so they say.

When I was younger, I always assumed that adults had it all down. They knew everything, and someday, if I worked hard enough, I could know everything too. If I wanted to start my own website, well, I could learn to code and build it. If I wanted to become an architect, I could work hard and apply for graduate school. If I wanted to get in shape, be an athlete, I could wake up every morning and go for a run, and start doing yoga. You get the picture.

But then I was hit with a dose of disillusion. Truth is, no one has time for everything. No one can know everything there is to know. It’s not even possible to know most things. That’s why specialization exists, that’s why we pick majors and hire other people to do the things we don’t know how to do. Maybe that’s why writing appeals to me: I don’t get to be an architect or a software developer or an astronaut, I don’t really get to be an expert at anything. But I can write about it.

David Foster Wallace’s writing is characterized as cerebral, erudite, truthful, haunting, unyielding. Or at least, that’s how I describe it. He had a thirst for knowledge, from theoretical mathematics to the nervous system of crustaceans, and then went further, to find out what all of this had to do with the meaning of life. He wrote to help his readers understand their existence so that they might come away from his prose having learned something new about the big question. A tall order.

Of course, he endured a grueling battle with depression for two decades, and after writing one of the most epic novels of the century, he set out to do more. He wanted to know more, he wanted to understand why he existed and why he was conscious. He wanted to know the answer to the questions that humans have pondered for eternity: ‘what does my life mean?’

Before he could complete his second epic novel, one that was a semi- autobiographical piece that can’t be summarized in one essay, let alone one sentence, David Foster Wallace ended his own life. His wife found him hanging from the ceiling of his porch, his unfinished manuscript stacked nearby.

The scale of the questions he was asking proved to be too much. The knowledge he wanted to have was too vast for one person. He gave in to the disillusion of existence; the delusion that somehow knowledge can save us. He fell victim to the mantra that betrays us all; the mantra that says that somehow, some way, it is possible to learn all there is to know. That it’s possible to discover an ultimate truth through learning and experience.

Among soon-to-be graduates, there’s a collective sense of dread. Students are under pressure to get a job, and not just a job, but a career. In these few months around graduation, this period of transition, every decision has tangible gravity. Each one weighs upon the conscience like the pounds of water above the diver or the gravity of the Earth holding the astronaut in its grasp.

The most fear-inducing bit is the sense of uncertainty. Everyone offers advice: here’s the right path to take, the correct way to do things, they say. This is how to craft the perfect résumé and how to behave in an interview to get that dream job. But, truth is, no one knows what will happen next.

Now, every decision has a sense of finality. That there’s a fork in the road and the direction chosen is inalterable. In college, and especially in a liberal arts program, it’s easy to be seduced by the delusion of knowledge. It’s easy to imagine that you can do anything and learn anything and be anything. But then graduation comes along and you’re forced to choose.

Ever since I was a child playing with LEGOs and wooden blocks, I’ve wanted to be an architect. I remember the awe I felt when I realized that every single building I had ever seen had been designed by someone. It started with toys and turned into an obsession; I read Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs and any bit of architectural theory I could get my hands on. And then I didn’t get into the program I wanted, and I gave up on my dream to become an architect.

Now I’m a writer and I’m about to have an English degree and the idea of writing as a career is also seductive. Living in Park Slope, rubbing elbows with Jonathan Franzen at cocktail parties and being invited to speak at n+1 events and dropping acid at a cabin deep in the mountains. It seems both bohemian and glamorous. But the reality of writing isn’t glamorous. Nothing is ever as glamorous as the imagination. That’s the biggest travesty in the world.

So I’m leaning towards the third best option. I’m looking at copywriting positions at advertising agencies and corporations and I reassure myself that I’ll write essays on the weekends, that the advertising job is just to secure an income and have health benefits and a snazzy business card and that I’m not selling my soul. There’s so much pressure to pick a path and start a career that the decision feels like the last one I’ll ever make. The decisions I make in my twenties will define the rest of my life. An entire lifetime, determined in under a year.

If it weren’t for the sertraline, I would be huddled under a blanket, nauseous and shivering, heart pounding and struggling to stay alive.

When an astronaut starts to feel faint under the increased gravity, or a diver struggles to process oxygen, the symptoms include increased heart rate and blood pressure, nausea, and narrowed vision. All of this happens just before the victim passes out: this is the body’s response to a lack of oxygen in the brain. The victim, of course, will fall flat on the ground, and the head and the heart will lie level, thus easing the strain on the cardiovascular system. That’s why astronauts seats are prone during liftoff.

A panic attack is characterized by similar symptoms: racing heart, nausea, tunnel vision, and even fainting. Panic attacks are brought on by stress, by mental pressure, by existential dread. Once, I had a panic attack at a concert when a kid behind me passed out from heat exhaustion. It was at one of those massive outdoor festivals, and we were crammed in the front fifth of the swaying audience of, oh, thirty thousand people. Within minutes of that kid collapsing, I started to hyperventilate. I tried to focus on something in the middle distance, tried to crane my neck up to breath the cooler, unregurgitated air. My vision began to swim, the laser lights on the stage blurring into a psychedelic mesh, blackness creeping in from the edges and a red gauze draping over the center as the noises seemed more and more distant. The last thing I remember, before slumping over lifeless, was grabbing my friend’s shoulder and muttering something about “get me out of here.” All that, because of some kid a few rows back planted the thought in my mind that I was surely, without a doubt, going to die of a heat stroke.

Other panic attacks haven’t been so dramatic. Once I felt homesick and terror struck. The recent ones have all been about my future. About what happens next. This is the first rite of passage I’ll undergo when I don’t know what the future holds.

Marina Keegan was a writing student at Yale. She wrote the essay I wish I could write. It’s called “The Opposite of Loneliness” and she wrote it just before she graduated. She had a few more absolutes lined up: a job at the New Yorker and an apartment in Brooklyn waiting for her. She wrote:

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out — that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving.

She wrote with beauty and optimism; with the confidence that only a stellar Ivy League student could have. Her prose is simple and infectious.

Marina died in a car crash a week after she graduated. Maybe she was wrong about time.

It’s damn near impossible to see time with any sort of range, with any sort of scope, after reading Marina’s fate, or knowing how David Foster Wallace ended up. How can anyone think in terms of a lifetime, when brilliant lives are cut short so often, so unfairly?

Even avoiding mortal awareness and death anxiety, as any twenty-two-year-old should, it’s hard to understand that a lifetime is a long time. I’ve been around for two decades and haven’t accomplished much, but not many people accomplish anything before they hit 30. That’s why Rimbaud is famous.

The New York Times Magazine featured a story on people who are masters of their craft at an old age. Over age 80, to be specific.

T. Boone Pickens, still actively running his multi-billion dollar investment firm at 86. Carmen Herrera, a painter who didn’t sell a canvas until she was 89, and is working hard at 99. Frank Gehry, the renowned architect who just finished designing Facebook’s headquarters and is busy at work on a new museum in France. Betty White, the actress known for her vigor, charming audiences at 92. These people did not accomplish everything in life in their twenties. They were entirely different people then. The world was a different place. They weren’t successful investment bankers or architects when they were 22, or even when they were 32. The crippling fear comes from the idea that if I don’t set out on the proper path soon, don’t get on my way to being an obscenely successful writer or whatever as soon as I graduate, I’ll never succeed. But these people are succeeding well past their youth, or even their adulthood. There’s no reason to catastrophize just yet.

Truth is, I can go on to be an architect at 40 and publish a novel at 60. I can sail across an ocean or climb mountains. The first draft does not need to be perfect, because the magic lies in revision. The magic comes after decades of experience and reflection, and for now, I need to focus on staying in the driver’s seat. I need to avoid the cloud of anxiety and come to terms with myself and focus on the day to day effort of being alive, because there are so many days in a lifetime.

Because I’m young, and there is so much time. We have so much time.