Burning. Suffocating/drowning. Torture. Those all horrify me on a gut level.
Clingy animals like frogs give me the heebies.
I’m afraid of heights, too, but I’ll take falling to my (certain) death over any of the three in my first line, there.
I fear being ill, penniless, and alone. My husband has very little life insurance. If he were to die, I would be in a very fragile financial condition. We are barely able to pay our bills now, and without his income I’d be a bag lady out on the street.
I assume you mean one overriding fear, the fear that trumps all others sort of fear. I mean, there’s lots of things I’m afraid of, but if I had to pick just one… hrm.
Losing my mind. I don’t mean true insanity – that’d be scary, but by its very nature I doubt I’d notice. I mean something like what happened to my mother.
She was a phenomenally intelligent woman. If IQ scores matter, I’ve seen hers; they reinforce this assessment. I’ve grown up watching her tackle incredibly challenging intellectual problems and solve them. She used to know every programming language I’ve ever heard of, could teach them to others (and did), worked on mainframe systems at colleges and universities, you name it. Mom was smart. She was focused on computers and technology, but able to apply her brains to other areas as well. When I expressed an interest in codes as a young’un, she taught herself cryptology theory and techniques so she could pass them on to me (I was stumped by the math and other stuff that the library books on the subject had; mom made it simple to understand). Things like that. She wasn’t SuperMom, able to do EVERYTHING PERFECT!!! But she could solve problems like nobody I knew. She could apply her knowledge from one field to another. This, to me, is the mark of true intelligence.
And then she got in the car accident. There was some head trauma. Not much, and nothing serious, according to the doctors. Not even a full-blown concussion, really.
Mom has lost it all. She’s fully functional, but the brilliance is gone. She has huge troubles learning new things. Details escape her. It frustrates her to no end, because she remembers being able to do all these things so easily before. She can barely remember things that she used to teach to entire classrooms full of up and coming technical students. She can barely remember phone numbers, for that matter. It’s not just short-term or long-term memory that’s affected; her ability to learn, to analyze, has gone completely out the window.
Watching my mom go from the most brilliant person I’ve ever known, witty, quick-thinking, able to analyze any problem with ease, to someone who cries in front of her computer because she can’t remember how to format pages in Word is the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen.
Because of some stupid silly head bump, my mom lost everything that she had been so proud of, had worked so hard for, for her whole life.
THAT is my greatest fear.
Being stuck or trapped or locked up or in jail or terminally ill – anything that removes my options.
I am phobically afraid of amputation of any body part. If I were told that it was cutting off a pinky or my life, I’d probably choose to die.
Canibalism is a hefty subsection of this.
Right now, my greatest fear is that there really is a heaven . . . and Jerry Fallwell’s in charge.
Being put in a nursing home because that’s the convenient thing to do.So I can be drugged because I try to leave,then the drugs cause me to fall and I need restraint.All the while nobody comes to visit and my fellow inmates sit in contortions and drool and talk about WTF?
This is happening to a friend. Make no mistake ,we are an advanced society.Where’s my goddam ice floe?
Deep water scares me. I’m fine in boats or bridges or such, but when I’m actually in the water, I think about how I’m suspended here, with the bottom hundreds or thousands of feet below me, so far down that I can’t even come close to seeing it. Whatever’s down there has probably never been seen by humans, and if I drown, I’ll go all the way down into the darkness and never come back. I won’t be able to see the bottom coming (realistically, I’ll be long dead by then, but we’re not talking about rational fears here), I’ll just suddenly hit it in the dark. And then, the things that live down there will come out to feed…
I don’t panic over it, but it makes me uneasy enough that I can’t really have fun if I’m in the water really far from shore. Probably a good self-preservation trait.
The most terrifying thing about drowning in deep ocean, to me, would be the knowledge that this is what’s waiting for me.
Dozens of these skittering out of the darkness to feast.
[Both links are safe for work. The first links to a Youtube clip that requires a second click to start]