Fear Itself

 "The neurotic's strongest fantasy is that he has no fantasies. 
The real is very real to him, the unreal even more so." ~Mignon McLaughlin

I spend a lot of time thinking about fear. Or more specifically, things that scare me. If  we're in a circle of trust right now and I'm being totally honest, I pretty much live in a constant state of fear. Like when you're watching a scary movie and you're already on the edge of your seat and then you hear your Venus razor fall from it's suction cupped holder on your shower wall and come crashing down with the loudest sound in the world. Even though it's just a little plastic razor, it's always so fucking loud. You jump and scream and then immediately hide under a blanket until you can pull yourself together enough to *maybe* go investigate the source of the loudest sound ever, fully expecting to find a deranged psycho killer (clearly not a very quiet one) lurking behind your shower curtain. That edge of your seat fear is my constant state of being.

I collect fears and phobias like it's a hobby. The way some people collect stamps or coins or their nail trimmings. For reference, here is a short list of about 12% of the things that I am actively terrified of:

-Vampires (laugh if you want, I'll be over here with my garlic necklace and holy water)
-Snakes
-Falling
-Belly buttons (or as I like to call them... the gateway to hell)
-Eating moldy food
-Bridges
-Getting into a car accident on a bridge and my car falling off the bridge and into a body of water (the size of the body of water does not matter)
-Not having any chapstick
-Getting stuck on a deserted island or a world apocalypse and not having access to a store where I can get chapstick
-My debit card declining
-On the days that I actually do manage to shower and blow dry my hair and use my flat-iron, I worry that I will leave it turned on, leave my house and the flat-iron will get so hot that it causes a fire in my house
-Leaving my garage door open
-Not cleaning the lent out of the dryer and it catching on fire
-Farting in front of people
-Someone living in a cabinet in my house that I don't use or maybe my attic without me knowing or maybe just lurking in my basement (I don't have a basement)
-Those old-fashioned bikes with the huge wheel in the front and the tiny wheel on the back
-3D printing (I refuse to even find out how this even works because it just doesn't seem natural)
-Running out of gas
-Getting hiccups that never go away. Ever. 
-Flying without being medicated
-Flying when I am medicated

It's impossible for me to even come close to listing each one of my fears and it's difficult to pinpoint exactly why or how it started. I mean, the easiest thing to do would be to blame my parents and my shitty childhood. So, let's start there. Mom.... Dad.... thanks so much for being self obsessed and dysfunctional, and ruining my childhood, thus making me a paranoid, antisocial hermit who prefers to stay at home and away from all the mean people in the big scary world. Finally something you guys can actually take credit for. Hooray for you! This is such an exciting time in your lives! Now that we've gotten that out of the way.... I would have to say I first realized I had this constant internal fear thing going on when I was 3 years old. I remember having these really intense nightmares practically every night. My parents rented this little 2 bedroom apartment literally on the wrong side of the tracks. You could hear the train drive by several times each day and throughout the night. I had my own bedroom with a window that faced a hill, at the top of the hill was the slaughter house that my dad worked at for a while. I had this recurring dream that this short, fat, cartoonish, but still evil-looking, devil was running down the hill from the rendering plant, heading straight for my window. Sometimes I would wake up before he reached my window but other times I would keep dreaming until he reached my window and started peering inside. I would wake up terrified and alone and I would climb out of my full-sized bed and tip toe through the dark, across the hall, to my parents room. I wasn't allowed to sleep with them, they even tried putting an over sized brown teddy bear in bed with me so that I would think it was one of them in bed with me and stop sneaking into their bed, but it never worked. I always woke up relieved  at first that I wasn't alone until I realized it wasn't someone who could actually protect me lying next to me. It used to piss me off, but I was terrified of getting in trouble or disappointing anyone, so I would curl up under the ledge on the side of their 1980s style water-bed and cover up with the jeans my dad had worn at work all day skinning cattle. Sometimes I would pull a stack of my dad's secret penthouse magazines out from the cubby between the water-bed and the wall and use them as a pillow. I would stay curled up there until morning, dreaming about aliens. In one dream I am sleeping in that exact secret spot except I am at my grandma's apartment instead of my own. My aunt and my grandma are in the water-bed instead of my mom and dad. I wake up to the smell of bacon frying in a cast iron skillet and open my little brown eyes to see a pair of scary, gnarled feet with dagger like toenails hit the floor next to me, right in front of my face. I realize that my grandma, my aunt and of course my mom (since it's always about her all the time anyway) are all aliens who unzip their skin suits after I fall asleep each night and reveal their true alien selves. Usually they have time to climb back into their human suits before I wake up in the morning but this time I'm sleeping in my secret safe place under the edge of the bed so they don't have time to suit up before I see them. I  try to run and escape out the front door but they chase me in circles around the living room before I can reach the door. My dad is in the kitchen cooking bacon and when I beg him to help me, he grins, lifts his spatula and waves at me with it. People with fancy titles in front of their names, people who are really smart, maybe not smarter than you but definitely smarter than me, will tell you that nightmares are usually a normal part of adolescents and can be caused by many different things. However since we're taking the easy way out and blaming my parents, fancy smart people also claim that nightmares can be caused by stress and recurring nightmares can happen when children go through difficult ongoing life situations like bullying or abuse.

My great-grandfather passed away when I was 4 and we moved in with my great grandma. My nightmares followed me but changed their shape. This time I dream that there is an alien space ship under my bed. A man lives in the space ship with the aliens who have abducted him and are now using him to lure me into the ship so they can abduct me too. When I wake up afraid and alone,  I creep down the long wooden hallway in the dark all the way to Mamaw's bedroom, the old wooden boards squeaking under my tiny feet as I go. She welcomes me and makes sure I get settled under the blankets. She tells me stories about her childhood until I fall asleep. Soon I sleep in Mamaw's bed every night. It makes my mother angry. Or maybe jealous but the jealousy manifests itself as anger. Even in the safety and comfort of Mamaw's bed, the nightmares still manage to find me. I dream that my Papaw is actually still alive, but my dad has banished him from the house and he's been forced to live in the woods, through the pasture, and behind our house. Sometimes he tries to sneak up to the house to see Mamaw and me but my dad always catches him and chases him through the tall grass back to the woods holding a large shotgun. Sometimes I hear a loud gunshot before I wake up terrified and confused. Other times I simply dream that I'm falling into nothing. Just a black abyss. I can literally feel the air rushing past me, pushing against my tiny body as I fall. I cry in my sleep and Mamaw wakes me up and hugs me and tells me it's just a dream. I stay in her bed until I'm 7 years old. Then my parents divorce.

For the most part,  I had a magical childhood at Mamaw's house. She owned several acres of land. She had flower gardens and vegetable gardens. We picked watermelon and fresh strawberries. We dug potatoes out of the dirt. When It rained, I would make mud pies and throw them at imaginary witches. I walked barefoot up and down the dirt road with my cousins to the creeks that bordered the house. We searched for tadpoles and crawdads under slippery rocks. We would sit, swinging our legs over the water, on the old rickety wooden bridge that my Papaw built with his own hands after him and Mamaw bought their house. We collected bright green horse apples to feed the horses as we walked along the dirt road. But not my mom's horse because he was an asshole. He loved to trick people into being nice to him and as they reached out to pet him or feed him he would bite them. No one ever rode him and during the summer when the grass in the pasture grew tall, you couldn't even see him. He was my mom's wedding present from my dad. His name was Sham. Like their marriage.

The fear didn't go away when the sun came up though. It didn't get lost in the tall grass like Sham and it always managed to find me walking on the dirt road. Afraid of mountain lions lounging in high tree branches, swishing their tails back and forth above me as I walked through the shade. Afraid of snakes under the rocks in the creek instead of crawdads or baby frogs. Afraid the school bus carrying the older kids would be too heavy for the old wooden bridge that Papaw built and the boards would break under the weight of the heavy vehicle, causing it to fall into the creek several feet below. When I heard cars rumbling down the dirt road, I would run and hide behind a tree or a parked car so that no one would see me and kidnap me. Although this fear of being kidnapped would eventually prove to be warranted.

As I grew older, and moved away from Mamaw and Arkansas, my old friend fear followed me. We moved to California and into the spare bedroom in my uncle's tiny apartment while he was away doing Navy things and his wife was away doing his Navy friends. My uncle actually set up a bed in between his kitchen and living room for me to sleep on but it was next to a sliding glass door and a Christmas tree. Apparently I was also afraid of Santa Clause. I know this because I peed my pants once when I saw him in the mall. Needless to say, I refused to sleep in the bed and be murdered or kidnapped by a psychotic Santa with a giant sack of "toys". My mom trusted me enough to leave 7 year old me alone in the apartment with my 2 year old sister for hours while she went out looking for a job. I would listen to ZZ Top and stack pillows up so I could peek out the peep hole on the front door and look up and down the street, keeping my eye out for suspicious individuals. Or my mother. Soon we moved to Georgia where I slept with a nightlight and my new step dad's old cat named Alley. I fell asleep to Alley's purrs as she gently dug her claws into my chest and I thought about Mamaw's stories. Eventually my mom grew to hate Alley too and threatened to have her put down because she said Alley always peed on her clothes. Only my mom's clothes.  I remember being so upset the night before they took Alley away that I grabbed  the Little Mermaid comforter off my bed and snuck outside to sleep in my step dad's old CJ-7 Jeep. It was the middle of winter and freezing. The old Jeep's thin, tattered plastic windows were no match for the Georgia winter and if my cat wasn't allowed inside on her last night then I would stay with her. My step dad eventually came outside and convinced me to come back inside, he told me Alley had fur to keep her warm and would be fine but I left my blanket just in case. I stayed home alone the next day when they took her to the vet. I cried all day until they came home but quickly wiped away the tears when I heard the rumble of the jeep's engine as it pulled into the driveway. My mom came inside and walked past me without saying anything. My step dad came over and knelt down in front of me and told me the vet offered to take Alley back to his farm and let her live in the barn behind his house. He said she would live a happy life, catching mice. I worry all the time about that being a lie.But if we're being honest in the circle of trust, I worry all the time about everything.