There are a few things I’m totally scared of and think about a lot, even though they’re absolutely ridiculous and at least one of them has virtually zero chance of ever happening:
1) Forgetting my phone number. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I have a recurring nightmare where I’m being pursued by someone and I need to call home for help. I arrive at a pay phone and, with trembling fingers, push in a coin, but I can’t remember my phone number. I start to dial, stop, hang up, have to replace the coin, repeat over and over, as the person pursuing me gets closer and closer. Now, I freeze up every time someone asks my phone number.
2) A nightmare I used to have but haven’t in awhile is where I’m in an elevator, going up, only the elevator doesn’t stop moving. I know it’s going to shoot through the roof of the building, I know it’s going to fly through the air, and I know I’m going to die. Since we live close enough to the ground now and just take the stairs to get into the apartment, I don’t have that nightmare anymore… usually. Yesterday I was coming up from the basement with a load of laundry, and of course that meant I was taking the elevator. I pushed the button for my floor, but the elevator passed it and kept going up. My gut flipped and my heart literally skipped a beat, because I was positive my nightmare was about to come true.
3) Buildings, or bridges, collapsing. Seriously. I’ve been afraid of bridges for a long time now, because once as a child, I heard about a bridge collapsing in Connecticut decades ago. The fear of the building collapsing has only happened since we had Maia; now, every night when I go to bed, I pull the covers up to my chin and can’t fall asleep until I plan how we’d escape the building intact. I don’t know if we could, and that terrifies me. It’s not even that our apartment building is in disrepair, I just can’t stop worrying about it. I wonder if we would die right away, or live just to die later, if I would have to hear my baby in pain or… ugh, god, my blood runs cold just trying to write about this.
What are some of your irrational fears?
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We all have crazy fears. My elevator dream has the elevator going like a roller coaster!
Once you have children, all the litte fears and phobia’s you have take on a new meaning. Now, you have another life to protect from these terrible things, plus you realizing your mortality. So, it is just another phase of parenthood–the intensification of fears. One must put them all into prospective, especially as children can sense when you are tense and nervous/scared. When you were little and would fall, I would be so scared that you were severly hurt, but I would pick you up, hug you and be all light hearted (while my heart was beating a mile a minute). Never let you see the fear in my eyes!
The phone number–are you kidding? Do you know how common it is for people to forget their number, when asked?? Thank God mine is easy to remember! Your number on the other hand, doesn’t “flow”.
Oh honey, I’m riddled with paranoia about unlikely scenarios. Falling, crashing, drowning in the bathtub or TOILET, choking on a million different things, on an on. Its a miracle I get through each day without panic attacks.
Your elevator experience would have freaked me out.
I am not really scared of heights but when someone is falling on a movie, tv or even a video game I have to look away.
@Cara: I used to worry about cameras in toilets as a teenager. Cause… people want to see me poop?!
@Jinxy: I agree re: the falling thing… my stomach turns too!
1. heights – and it isn’t just limited to super heights a la CN Tower….don’t even think of asking me to climb a ladder
2. falling backwards – even leaning backwards freaks me out
3. bad luck will haunt me forever if A. don’t lift both my feet up when I cross over railroad tracks in a car B. don’t do the sign of the cross when I pass a cemetary
Anything to do with my child — I check her breathing when she’s napping all the time. Everyday.
I have the weirdest and scariest feeling I’m going to outlive my family. And I mean ALL of them. I’m scared that I will be left alone and will have to watch all my family die. I hate that feeling.
I’m not religious but I make the sign of the cross every time I cross a bridge or go in a tunnel. You know, JUST IN CASE.
I could have a lot to say about this, but it would require too much concentration.
I have an irrational fear of my eyeballs falling out when I’m reading. specifically my left one. I am also afraid that my eyes will cross, for no reason, or that my left pupil will get really big and totally overshadow the right one.