Let me start this entry with a confession: I don’t like staying away from home. I’m a complete wimp about it. I like being with my parents and my brothers, safe at home, with my room, and my bed. It is for this reason that when my parents wanted me to try staying a night or two a week at school, age 14, I cried my eyes out.

Never mind that there were kids half my age who stayed all week, something about Resi made me want my mummy.

See! I’m a complete wuss!

Why oh why am I now, age 21, starting t feel the same feelings of apprehension about university? I’ve been through this with myself again and again: if I don’t leave home now, when will I do it? Do I want to be the only 50 year old still living with his parents? No. therefore this is something I must do, for both mine and my parent’s sanity. To be sure, part of me is looking forward to it: more freedom than ever before, cool people to talk to, bars etc.

And yet there’s that old familiar tingle in my stomach which tells me to stay in bed and hope the problem will go away. What if I don’t find out where lectures are? What if I forget something? What if I’ve missed something I’m supposed to know? All these things are now going through my head, and I’m not sure what to do. Frankly, I’m scared.

I’m also scared that I’ll bottle it, and ask to be taken home. That must not happen – leaving home starts now, or it never will. As much as I worry about the big, wide world, I really do not want to say home all my life, never to see thhings like the amason or the great barrier reef. I cannot – I must not – be a wuss all my life.