Pathological Fears, a Revisitation

I've pretty extensively covered my list of irrational fears over the years, as it's something that I think about a lot. But after an experience a few weeks back, and my re-watching the movie Signs over the weekend, I've been once again put on notice by my brain that I even though I'm scared of a ton of things, those things continue to evolve constantly.

Most noticeably on the list of things that don't scare me anymore: I no longer have to keep my bed up against the corner of a room while I sleep (so as to have no way for anything to sneak up on me in the middle of the night). This one has been a gradual thing and is due to the layout of my bedroom requiring my bed to be offset from walls on all sides. In conjunction with this, I no longer get paranoid jags in which I think something/someone might be hiding under my bed. Which means that now I can get up to get a glass of water in the middle of the night without the fear that I'm about to get dragged down below. I like to think of these two abated fears as signs that I'm growing up.

Also, you can throw in the fact that I've gotten past the problem of not sleeping with my bedroom door open. Apparently the fear was that if someone broke into the house, they would have unfettered access to me (whereas a closed door is apparently akin to a brick wall. I don't know, don't blame me, these are irrational fears.) So, yeah, definitely growing up.

But not completely, as some things have remained constant on the irrational fears list:

Still can't sleep with the closet door open. This one is especially difficult because the shifting foundation of my building has caused the frame around my closet to cant by about 5 degrees, making closing the door physically impossible. So now I have to settle for wedging the door as close to closed as possible. Those last two inches of openness still make me nervous.

Also, I'm still afraid of clowns, but I continue to assert that this one doesn't belong on the irrational fears list. It's totally rational. Goddamn clowns.

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Anyways, the whole point of this diatribe is that I've got two brand new fears that are way more prominent nowadays. See, I bought a new shower curtain a couple of weeks back. One of those fancy cloth numbers that goes on the outside of the plastic one, to give the illusion that you're a classy person. It's white and has stitched palm trees all over it, and it's pretty swank. It's also terribly heavy, which means that I have to keep it closed pretty much at all times, since my shower rod is notoriously wobbly and uneven weights on it cause it to come crashing down really unexpectedly.

As I learned at 3 AM on Tuesday last week, when I was startled awake by a crash so loud that I immediately assumed that the condo had finally been pushed to its limit and was collapsing all around me, House of Usher style. It was also in that brain-fogged moment that I realized I have no training in how to respond in cases of earthquake/house collapses. Mostly I just screamed like a girl and rolled off the bed like a ninja, only to get my legged wrapped up in the duvet and flopped to the ground face first.

So anyways, heavy shower curtain means I keep it closed at all times now. And now I am constantly -- constantly -- convinced that someone is hiding behind the curtain. Too many horror movies combined with New Fear #2 (below) and the time that I was 11 and my cousin hid in the shower to scare me while I was brushing my teeth have trained me to be so paranoid that I can barely function in my bathroom until I have spent a couple of hair-raising moments darting over to the shower and peeking around it to verify that I am indeed alone so I can wash my hands free of fear.

New Fear #2 is way more insidious and way more crazy too: I constantly imagine that I'm being stalked. This one has been hanging around a lot, but is more prominent after the Signs watching. See, a few weeks back, I was cleaning up the kitchen super late (like around 11:00pm) and needed to take out the trash, for fear that the Black Plague that I just scrubbed away would take on sentience in the trash bag and kill me in my sleep. So I wandered down to the dumpster on the far side of the complex.

(To understand the next part, you have to have some idea of the layout of the complex. This particular side doesn't border on the street, instead we're up against a mini-forest; it's the treeline to the little creek that runs out from the park to the north. So the layout goes Street-> Buildings -> Dumpster -> Lawn -> Trees.)

I toss the trash into the dumpster and turn to head back to my building. Midway through the turn, I swear I see someone across the lawn standing along the treeline, staring at me. More precisely, it's a white guy in a really dark suit. He's standing in the shadows of the trees, and it's just for a second as I'm turning, but I can still make out enough to tell he looks bald and is most definitely looking in my direction. I freak the hell out (as one does) and start heading back to my apartment double-time. Only when I turn back after a couple of seconds, there's no one standing there. More importantly, the lightpost on the lawn is brightly illuminating the place where I supposedly saw this person - there's no way that it would have been dark enough to hide someone in the shadows.

I chalk it up to a completely overactive imagination (which I've got in spades - ask me about my law library sub-basement stories sometime), and head home, only mildly still freaking out.

Now, ever since then, I'm constantly expecting this guy to pop up somewhere. Whenever I go outside at night, I'm looking everywhere, all the time, alert like a cougar. I've seen nothing since then, but it doesn't mean I'm not going crazy.

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So yeah, I'm crazy like whoa. It's not unexpected, but still, it's a little sad.