Let's preface this post with a short explanation about why I use "let's" a lot in these posts. According to my Business and Professional Speaking professor, Dr. Hutchinson, the use of words (or in this case contractions) that use words like "us" and "we" increases the verbal immediacy between the speaker (me) an the audience (you). Verbal immediacy meaning that we are in the same boat together, it makes me more relatable, and puts me on the same level as you. Let me know how that's working.
This post is going to take place in two parts: The first will be about an experience today. The second will be a reprint of something I wrote back in November while reading Stephen King's It.
Earlier today I found a great new site called listverse.com. Listverse is a blog that has an infinite number of Top 10 lists ranging from the historical to the pop-cultural (which in my mind are pretty much the same thing but that's another post). The neat thing about the site, besides the boundless avenues to venture down, is that fact that a large number of the lists are user generated.
One of the last lists I perused today was the Top 10 Unbearable Phobias. This list being comprised of those phobias that would be the most difficult to live with. Among them Ambulophobia - the fear of walking or standing. Decidophobia - the fear of making decisions. And Somniphobia - the fear of sleep. It would be easy to make light of any of these, but there is a certain terror involved in even thinking that these phobias are affecting people.
Everyone is afraid of something. A common fear is death. Allow maybe it's better qualified as dying. That is the long drawn out process of dying from an illness, or some other reason. Death is too quick, maybe it's a fear of not existing, but then again, if you don't exist, neither do your fears.
I'm afraid of getting cancer. This probably stems from both of my grandfathers getting diagnosed at the same time, and one of them dying from it. But I also know two people my age this year that were diagnosed with cancer. That's kind of frightening. Seeing healthy people your own age getting sick.
I know a lot of people have recently said they are scared of thunderstorms in the last couple of days, which I think is kind of silly but I will try and be understanding.
People say we can't let our fears control us, but that can often be difficult. Sometimes it' hard to be rational. It's hard to not let fear overwhelm you. Usually we can pull ourselves out of it, to only let that fear consume us for a little while before breaking back through the surface. Or we take the Jack Shephard method to fear, and if you know what that is, we can be friends, and I'll let you stitch up my stomach.
Speaking of which, I think most people have a fear of being alone. I certainly do. Loneliness is not a fun thing. It can be nice to have time to yourself, sure, but deep down, we are social and intimate beings. We want to be around people and we want to be able to share with people. We want to share our hopes, dreams, feelings, frustrations, and desires. We want to be fulfilled by having someone we can share the burden of life with. I don't mean that in a depressing way, like life sucks or anything. I mean it in a hopeful, uplifting way, and well, I probably shouldn't have used a word like burden then. Hopefully you understand.
I'm gonna close out the first part of this post by disclosing one of my irrational fears. Every time I cross train tracks I have a fear of being hit by a ghost train. If you know the name for that, or want to make one up, hit the comments.
Now Part 2, titled: On Fears & the Like (11/7/10)
When I was a child, I feared two things more than anything else: the wind and aliens.
The wind was silly and was a fear I outgrew by kindergarten. I have three distinct memories of
that fear:
The first was when I was 4. I ran around a neighbors van in endless circles. My neighbor's mother, aware of my fear, asked if I was doing this because I was afraid the branches above me would fall on me. I told her no. The real reason was that when I ran I created a wind against my face. This made me oblivious to the natural wind. It helped me deal with my fear.
When I was 5, I was being babysat by a friends grandmother who had a hill in her backyard. Being winter, my friend, his sister, and I were supposed to go sledding. But high winds were blowing the snow around, and instead I spent the day inside coloring. This may be the first memory I have of letting my fear dictate what I do.
My final memory is again at the age of 5 (maybe 6) and my mother forced me to go outside to play. It was a gray, gusty fall day. My biggest trick to avoid playing outside on windy days was to hide in my garage. The garage had hockey sticks and nets, so I could usually get away with playing with those as long as I left the garage door open. However on this day, one of my parents had left their car in the garage. So I stood inside next to the car, which probably would have worked if not for my grandmother's untimely arrival. She pulled up and caught me sitting in the garage, and while I strongly implied I would not like my mother to know I was hiding in there, she ratted me out anyway.
The wind was a fear of the elements, of that which cannot be controlled, of power, or sound. My fear of aliens was quite different.
My fear of aliens came quite suddenly after seeing a blurb for a news story about UFO sightings in Wisconsin cornfields. I didn't know much about aliens, but I knew immediately that I didn't like them. My mother assured me there was no such thing as aliens, and that the story was only on air because it was so close to Halloween. While this appeased me for the moment, the seed had been planted.
I couldn't even watch Star Wars without getting frightened. I recall Jack Nicolson getting killed by a creepy-crawly alien hand in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! Yet at the same time, as much as I hated it, as much as I lost sleep over it, I still wanted to know more about UFOs and aliens.
I had an awful time with my imagination getting away from me (still do). I would have visions of long skinny gray arms, with skinny gray fingers appearing in door frames and beckoning me to follow them.
While most kids are afraid of the monsters under the bed, I was afraid of aliens. Whenever I was asked to go to the basement to get something, I had this idea of glowing gray bodies emerging from the darkness.
I hated it, and I hated the idea of fear. When I go down to that basement I find myslef revisiting those fear. Why? Because our fears never truly leave us. As much as we grow, change, evolve, and mature, we still have that person we were living inside of us.
The alien fear is obviously a fear of the unknown, of things that are different. But it is also a fear of drastic change. Of shattered realities and conceptions of truth. If aliens landed on earth tomorrow everything (most everything) I ever knew or believed to be true would be wrong and I would no longer know where I was.
The ground upon which I would stand would open up and swallow me whole.
But that might just be another fear.
[Narrator's Note: Ok, the second part of this post is kind of weird, and a little depressing, but I was reading It and it was probably about 1 a.m. when I originally wrote this, so clear thinking doesn't really factor into the occasion.]
Go ahead and hit the comments, what are you afraid of?
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