Being rather claustrophobic, one of mine would be:
Finding myself stuck in a pipe going down into the earth. My arms would be wedged tightly against the inner perimeter of the pipe. Location: in the wilderness, no chance of being found. Bugs and water streamlets would constantly be within mouths reach, so I couldn’t count on the slow death of starvation* to put me out of my misery.
…did’ja ever find your self in that situation?
I’ve got the willies just thinking about this.
How about your’s?
*A side question: Do you think that you could deliberately starve yourself if a food source was always in reach and visible?
I think it would be being buried alive in an undersized coffin in a place where no one will ever find me. A speaker is placed in the coffin with a tape that alternates between touching sounds of loved ones I will never see again and a narration of everything that I ever regretted. It is on infinite loop. A small water hose is available but no food and I have to crap and pee myself if I have to go. There is barely any range of movement. The temperature is cold enough to be chilly but not cold enough to kill me. I have to chose to die quickly from dehydration or hold out misguided hope of being found and starving to death or perishing from disease in the filth.
Wow. I also just creeped myself out with a scenario shortly before I read yours. Mine was me being brain-injured in a car accident, and having to go live in a nursing home for several months or years, having to learn everything all over again like walking or eating. <shudder> The worst part of my scenario is the realization that it actually could happen, any time I am in my car this could become my reality. Now I’m creeping myself out again.
Mine is never finding a job. Ever. Always being “#2” on the “person we’ll hire list.” Losing my savings, my home, pawning off my stuff, sleeping in the streets, and ending up some crazy street lady.
On a physical level, a friend of ours had a series of small strokes that left him unable to walk, unable to speak except a few guttural words and in such a fragile state that the doctors and family have asked friends not to send cards or letters as he gets so excited he has more mini-strokes. So basically he is isolated from the world and can only watch television at the private nursing home in a small village in Germany. I can only imagine the hell he is going through, and this has been going on for almost 10 years now.
and
sometime in the coming year, waking up one day and reading the headlines, “Constitution Amended - No More Term Limits For President”. That would be a real worst case scenario for me.
I was reading about this one nightmare-making disease called “locked-in syndrome”: complete paralysis of everything below your eyes. Typically people can only communicate using systems of codes expressed by blinking.
However, I read somewhere that, rather than the screaming horror that I’d expect to feel in such a circumstance, patients usually report feeling serene or “a bit sad.” I guess if I didn’t really mind, I wouldn’t really mind… but until that set in I’d be climbing the walls in my head.
Assuming that you’re talking about a repeal of the 22nd Amendment, I can’t agree with your fears. I personally would love to see it happen, because I would derive great pleasure from seeing GWB be massacred by this guy.
Mine would be me in a plane, at cruising altitude. I look out the window in time to see the engine on the wing next to me burst into flames, and the plane start losing altitude quicky. At that point Im pretty sure I would pass out, and die a painful, fiery death while in black-out land. Its bad enough that I have panic attacks on planes, I really dont need to be thinking about having a burning engine too!
My second worst would be me on a cruise going to like Europe, and halfway there something happens on the ship, and I’m stuck on the ship as it sinks, in some random room with a porthole. Not only would I be in very deep water, I would also have to watch as the ship goes down, and be stuck in there and not be able to do a thing about it. This sounds rather Titanic-esque, doesnt it?
Aah, gotta love phobias. I couldnt think of a good roach one, or else that would just round out my trio of phobias.
It’s funny, but that scenario, while being a bit of an inconvenience, really wouldn’t bother me…
Just kidding, that’s a willy inducer too.
Add to that an itchy foot you can’t scratch and “oh boy”!
I’m only claustrophobic if it’s pitch dark and I’m lying down. But in that situation I’m very claustrophobic. So I’ll ditto the previously mentioned claustrophobic ones and add to it being injured in some way that was extremely painful but not bad enough to end my life quickly.
The only thing I can think of that might be worse is slowly burning but not quite bad enough to kill me.
Something that always disturbs me, is when I hear about some catastrophe occuring in the middle of night. Earthquake, fire, flood, tornado… whatever. One miniute you’re sleeping then BAM! There’s no way your mind would be functioning properly in the first few seconds.
Last night I daydreamed this scenario and creeped myself out. But it’s actually NOT my worse-case scenario. That would be having one of my children die. I try to imagine it, and it’s just incomprehensible to me. I would literally die from it, I know I would. People say you go on, because they have other children to care for, etc., but I don’t know. I just don’t see how I’d survive it. How to people let their kids drive?? I guess I’ll find out in 2 short years…
I would go crazy and almost certainly kill myself.
All the preceding posts have scenarios that suck horribly as well.
Add being forced into a room that is completely swarming with insects. Spiders, centipeges, all those huge scary Amazonian jungle bugs, worms, beetles, everything. I think I would pass out, if not have a heart attack/stroke.
I actually said that would be my worst case scenario and used it to reassure myself when things got bad that at least that hadn’t happened to me. Then, my daughter died this summer. It is probably easier than some because she was an infant but it is still absolute hell. You do survive but it absolutely sucks. I thought about killing for a while myself but I do have another daughter to take care of. The worst part is knowing that nothing will ever fix it. If something happened to my remaining daughter, I have already made up my mind that I am killing myself as soon as I can. No way am I dealing with any more of that.
You can go on but it is not pleasant and something permanently changes inside of you.
OTOH, I found it jarring to read about worst case scenarios and saw that I already lived through one.
I’m so sorry, Shagnasty. I hope that it didn’t seem insensitive for me to bring it up, but it truly is my worst-case scenario. My deepest sympathy for you and your family.
Thank you. It wasn’t insensitive at all. Like I said, that is what I always listed as my worst-case-scenario too. After living through it, I would say that that fear was pretty accurate.
If you are just being realistic instead of coming up with outlandish situations then I think that one tops the list.
I had a series of other tragedies that occured around the same time. Most people would consider those bad. Nope, losing a child trumps everything else so hard that anything else you can come up with seems like a hangnail.
