On every single one of the 17 college tours I went on a tour guide told me that I would sign up for at least 20 random niche clubs once I was a student there. My overactive and neurotic high school brain went wild with this possibility. I participated in—for lack of a better word—a stupid amount of resume-building clubs and extracurriculars in high school, so I assumed that college would be exactly the same. I had visions of myself being the one working those fundraising tables you see when you take approximately two steps onto a college campus. Or maybe I would be a tour guide! Or maybe I’d be a proud participating member of my future school’s Habitat for Humanity Club! Or maybe I’d continue with Model United Nations! Basically, the possibilities seemed endless.

I am almost a month into my sophomore year, and I can count the amount of clubs or organizations I am involved with on campus on one finger. What the hell happened? Why this dramatic 180 from the over-involved person I was in high school? There are so many clubs that I am interested in here. I am jealous of all of my friends who are whisked away to their club meetings once a week, but I have no right to be jealous. I have hardly ever finished an application and have made up countless excuses to not attend a callout meeting. Why? The answer evades me.

I have diagnosed myself with Fear of Doing Things, FODT. FODT is the unsexy cousin of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). She is almost as unappealing linguistically as she is in practice. If you have FOMO, you’re outgoing and fun and always want to be around the other outgoing and fun people, places and things. If you have FODT (if you are struggling with this pronunciation, think “thot” with an F), you’re lazy and probably live in fear. Am I lazy? Do I live in fear? These are not character attributes that I normally associate with myself. Someone who has a fear of doing things is probably lonely and doesn’t feel like they belong at their school.

By no means am I lonely. I have plenty of friends and feel very fulfilled socially here. But when it’s 6 p.m. on a Wednesday and someone asks me if I’m going to so and so’s callout meeting, or if I’ve finished that application for the club I keep saying that I want to do, my first instinct is, “OK, how do I get out of this?” Maybe my almost instant social fulfillment at Washington University is what caused my downfall when it comes to doing things. I was so lucky to meet amazing friends at the very beginning of my first year, and feel like I’ve been making good acquaintances ever since, whether it be through classes or through the singular extracurricular I do (Greek life).

But forget social fulfillment—I should be participating in clubs that I am interested in! “Do I have interests anymore?” I ask myself with a simultaneously grave and panicked tone. At the end of my first semester, I told myself that my lack of involvement was because I was just “settling in.” And I used that same tired excuse for the following semester. Well, the settling period is officially over, and here I am with zero callout meetings attended and zero applications filled out. I feel like I’ve missed one of my last opportunities to “get involved,” and although I feel more or less like a loser because of it, I know that the only one to blame is not my fun new acronym, but myself. Maybe there are others out there with FODT. Ones who used to prioritize doing things and, dare I say, enjoyed doing things. Maybe FODT is a manifestation of anxiety or some sort of self-sabotage I have been carrying out that is tied in with the imposter syndrome that I have no reason to have. But I refuse to accept the fact that I have somehow just become lazy. I am not a lazy student, and I am not a lazy friend.

I have come to realize that doing things in college is much different than doing things in high school. There are no longer parents or college counselors present encouraging or, more realistically, demanding that you participate in things simply for participation’s sake. The reason why I am so displeased with my newfound FODT is because I feel like I should be displeased with it. I have been programmed to be dissatisfied with my shortcomings, and not participating in at least five extracurriculars is what, to me, feels like a shortcoming. However, this almost forced dissatisfaction has caused me to completely overlook the many aspects of my life that I am utterly satisfied with. I have forgotten that my happiness, health and engagement in my classes is something that I have, for the most part, successfully executed here at Wash. U.

To any first-years with FODT, don’t let this fear paralyze you. It is perfectly acceptable to participate in fewer things in college than you did in high school. If you are experiencing FODT, it might just be because you don’t feel the need to do things at this point in your college career. Although I am clearly still struggling with my own FODT and don’t have any definitive answers on how to deal with it, I can confidently say that is by no means even close to the worst problem you can have during college. If you have FODT, I recommend looking at the other parts of your life and student career that are going well. Cherish those victories and feel pride in them. While a little bit of introspection will not cure or erase your FODT, it will minimize its relevance. To those with FODT who, like me, worry that this condition will hurt them in the grand scheme of resume-building and networking, repeat that sentence to yourself and realize how ridiculous it sounds. Just because you are not vigorously motivated to drown yourself in clubs that you will someday write down on a piece of paper doesn’t mean that you have shut down any future opportunity you may someday get.

If you feel like your FODT is causing bigger issues for you and you feel like it might be linked to some other dissatisfactions you have with your life, pick one club to start out with: one that doesn’t have a rigorous and imposing application, just to get your feet wet and gain some momentum. Consider the fact that the reason you have this fear is because you are worried about commitment or scared of letting your hypothetical club members down, and address accordingly.

The hardest thing to remember is that you, and only you, can make yourself participate. I have recruited so many friends before to “force me to go to this meeting,” but that mentality is precisely what landed me with FODT in the first place. FODT is not fatal. Think of it like poison ivy; it’s not the best thing, and you hate having it—almost as much as you hate people asking about it—but if you slap some calamine lotion on that sucker (calamine lotion, of course, being some introspection and prioritizing and possibly the realization that you are okay with not being as involved as you think you should), the inflammation and redness will both go down.