Bees.
No, seriously. I’m deathly afraid of them. Not only can they sting, but they fly and are hella crazy fast about it, too. Then there’s the whole killer bee aggression thing, and the fact that even if you’ve been stung before anaphylactic shock could set in at any time.
And to add to that, I wouldn’t recommend Saw. Saw 2. Saw 3. Saw 4. Saw 5… Don’t watch any of those… Or you will be *#&@ed for life.
Wait until you’ve been chased by a few hornets… I go into panic mode then.
Running out of money before I die. Alzheimers. Any debilitating disease where I need to be taken care of without hope of recovery, especially one where I can’t off myself.
The Isle of Man.
And earthworms.
And slugs.
My biggest fear: Being in a horrible accident and not dying, but being paralyzed from the neck down and spending the rest of my life trapped in my own body.
I also can’t watch anything involving torture because of the anxiety it gives me. I declared myself banned from all such TV and movies after I watched George Clooney’s character get tortured in Syriana, and I realized I was taking notes on how he was enduring it, because one day this will happen to me.
Also, cockroaches and centipedes.
I’m afraid I’ll wake up some morning and my husband will be dead. Or come home from work and he’ll be dead.
Honestly, I think a normal person would have gotten over the terrified stage by now. I haven’t.
Carnies. You know, circus folk? Smell like cabbage. Very small hands.
I worry about that too. Sometimes I make myself a little weepy just thinking about how I’d cope. To be perfectly honest I know that I would be out of the country and probably in the Peace Corps within a month. And maybe not come back. I figure the only way I could deal is by completely changing my surroundings, and besides he’s the only thing keeping me in the U.S. anyways.
It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I actually can’t even look at the cover of the DVD box for Hostel without feeling ill. I remember we stopped by a movie store once and there was a whole display full of those boxes with the bloody forceps. I ended up feeling sick and leaving without renting anything. I am really, really sensitive to that stuff. I have PTSD for reasons unrelated to bloody forceps, but for some reason that crap just really triggers it.
For me–and I think I speak for many of us–it’s President John McCain. Or, even worse, President Sarah Palin.
That, and being unable to repay my student loans. I owe a friggin’ fortune. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding from anxiety about my debt.
I decided to have a quiet Halloween, so I curled up reading the scariest book I had: The Handmaid’s Tale.
Hive insects. Especially flying ones. Even their nests and anything reminiscent of them freak me out; I once made myself nauseous by pressing togther a large number of drinking straws and then looking at them from the top-down, which made them look like a honeycomb. Just talking about it now is making me itchy.
Which, to add insult to injury, is another phobia. (Epidermal) Hives or any sort of severe skin lesion makes me sick.
This applies to me too.
Cannibalism. It seems like such a horrifyingly total loss of humanity (or the equivalent for any other species). The idea that a person or animal could fall so far is way, way creepy for me–it’s like that person is a zombie, devoid of morality. Cannibalism just represents the last bastion of morality, the one moral line that demarcates the truly terrifyingly awful. Moral dilemmas based on cannibalism make me want to commit suicide while uncontrollably sobbing by setting myself on fire so that I can’t be eaten. Then I would be horrified by the thought of extinguishing the fire with my tears so that I was merely cooked and therefore tasty. I think I’m going to go gouge my eyes out now.
I also used to be terrified of being seen in a degenerative state by my loved ones–and, by extension, of being allowed to live in a degenerative state at all–but one of the few psychological benefits of my father’s recent passing is that I’ve come to grips with it more. I feel that my father’s dignity in his final days came from the example he set during his too-short lifetime, which has left a much larger impression on me than the sight of him on life support, as horrible as the latter was. He was a man of such impeccable moral character (to which I could hardly dream of aspiring) and such massive intellectual ability in the concrete (whose magnitude I am lucky to nearly rival in the abstract) that nothing could have come close to erasing his dignity. I now feel that temporarily being a difficult sight to one’s family is worth the extra moments one gets to spend with them; after all, if my father had not been put on full life support, I would not have seen him at all between the start of his decline and his passing. (It was fast.)
Of course, the thing that really freaks me out is the possibility of having another panic attack. Classic self-reinforcing anxiety there…
I recommend tutoring special-ed kids. That’s done wonders for my sense of self-worth, personally.
John “bomb bomb Iran” McCain and his know-nothing sidekick.
I spent 10 days on said Isle… it wasn’t all that scary.
This American is curious: what, exactly, is supposed to be scary about the Isle of Man?
Aging. Not just losing my looks and sagging/getting fat, though those are right up there. I mean getting so dysfunctionally old that I’m immobile, incontinent, and lost within my own mind. As a nurse I see this every single day and find no value in surviving that long.
Those cats.
Nothing scares me.
I’ve had enough of living
I’ve had enough of dying
I’ve had enough of smiling
I’ve had enough of crying
I’ve taken all the high roads
I’ve squandered and I’ve saved
I’ve had enough of childhood
I’ve had enough of graves…