What Scares You?

[ER]

Not the usual stuff, something peculiar to you.

Like me, I am always scared on expressways. I drive them every day, I know statistically they're the safest of roads, but I always feel especially at the mercy of other drivers on them and I am uncomfortable with that.

What relatively normal thing pushes your fear button?

(And by the way, I triple-pinky swear I will not come to your house and use your fear against you when anarchy comes, no, no no.)

[RCMerchant]

I don't like being in an airplane at all.

[ER]

I don't like being in an airplane at all.

Yeah..... I fly a lot and have all my life, and I swear until I was in my twenties flying, even over the Atlantic, didn't bother me, but the last.... well in this century, I never get on a plane without imagining the damage a crash would do to this body of mine, and for many years I had the same recurring dream about being on a plane free-falling from the sky. And yet I have to fly 15-20 times a year sometimes.

[ER]

You know what else scares me? When my kids eat hard candy. I'm just sure they're going to choke. They think it's funny and laugh about it and tease me.

[RCMerchant]

I don't like being in an airplane at all.

Yeah..... I fly a lot and have all my life, and I swear until I was in my twenties flying, even over the Atlantic, didn't bother me, but the last.... well in this century, I never get on a plane without imagining the damage a crash would do to this body of mine, and for many years I had the same recurring dream about being on a plane free-falling from the sky. And yet I have to fly 15-20 times a year sometimes.

I've only been on a plane twice in my life. That was enough.

[Alex]

I have an irrational fear that on takeoff, one of the wings will fall off an aeroplane. I am fine in regular flight.

[indianasmith]

Getting old.  Physical and mental debility.  Being useless.

[VenomX73]

big sharks...

[ER]

Long ramble. Don't read if you don't want to. If you don't want to you probably shouldn't. There's one person out there who reads it all, someone you don't even know, and it's mainly for him anyway.

A second sweep on my own earlier question. What scares me? Ha and ha. How much time ya got?

The truth is lots and lots and lots of things scare me. I am not fearless and I'm particularly afraid on behalf of people I love: too many fears there to begin to list them. I'm so afraid of bad things happening to my family that I daily beg God to let it happen to me instead. Take me and not them and I'll die wearing my much-practiced thousand-watt smile. I'll take the broken arm, the car wreck, the bullet, whatever it is. That's why when I get hurt or sick, I try not to complain, because maybe it was an answered prayer.

There is a man I used to know in England who terrifies me because nothing stops him and he has no conscience. His eyes were like staring into a very cold beautiful lake that had no bottom. He's still out there. He scares me.

I'm afraid of my very dear friend finding out something that'd hurt her and cost us out friendship. Sometimes I think she wouldn't even blame me but it'd still screw up her life.

I'm afraid of growing old and becoming senile, weak, helpless, of losing myself to time.

I'm afraid there'll be a spider in my shoes when I slip them on in the morning.

My faults, flaws, imperfections scare me, and I have a lot of them. I try to be a good person according to an adopted creed, and I suck at it. I have a idea in my head of what I'd like to be in terms of my relations with the world, and I am nowhere close to that ideal, and that scares me because I should be able to achieve that goal of self-perfection.

One thing I have learned however is to keep going when am afraid. Not a boast, I'm sure many or most of you are braver than me, but I can say in all humility I have learned that specific talent, to push on through fear, and it's served me.

I remember when I was nineteen and leaving to do the most dangerous thing I'd ever done in my life til then, and I was so afraid but I tried to hide it from my father when I went to tell him goodbye, and he knew of course how frightened I was, and he said something then that I have probably recalled every day since, and definitely when I've been scared. He looked me in the eyes and said, "Remember, you're a predator."

Laugh if you want, out of context it sounds risible, but it was also in that situation true, I was a predator, me. seemingly the least threatening person imaginable, innocent, harmless, setting off into a place where I would be in need of other people's protection. And that was the hook: they thought I was vulnerable and stepped up to look out for me, the good coming out in bad people (who in most ways weren't really so bad, they certainly thought they were right), and young little me, I took the motherf**kers down.

Because I was a predator.

Shrug, whatever affirmations it takes to get us through this life, right? Maybe you have your own.

"Remember, you're a predator." Sometimes that's mine. It certainly contrasts with another description of me I also treasure, an earlier one: "This one's my angel." Poor man had no idea how wrong he was.

How about death? Does death scare anybody? Dying, well, that's another story, but what about death? It doesn't scare me, and sometimes it feels welcome, though I don't want to leave my loved ones. I used to say we can't know what comes after death, and maybe nothing does, but I don't believe that anymore, I think one man did return from death and coming to weigh the evidence of the claims about him returning to life 2000 years ago and finding them supported changed my own outlook so now I think of death in somewhat positive terms.

Someday I'll have a stroke in old age, or one of those insane drivers will get me, or maybe long before that someone will day will walk up and shoot me in the face believing it justice and revenge, my brain will explode like a rotten pumpkin, and next thing I know I'll be amid eternity, walking over and giving my grandma a long pent-up hug, then I'll go track Brian down and tell him how sorry I am for all the rotten things I did to him even though I loved him with all my heart. (Considering he'd be in Heaven I think he'd sort of have to forgive me. Isn't that how it works?)

Kinda personal, right? All this is.

But fear....I have a lot of it, yet my Viking DNA comes out on occasion and I do laugh in the face of it when I am able, and I do try to press on when I'm scared, be it driving on the expressway every day amid drivers who clearly have a homicidal wish for themselves and others, or in many other ways, and as I've done it I've noticed something, that the more fear is confronted, the less intimidating it is.

Except for the fears about my family. Yes, those remain.

I dunno, sitting here looking out at the night in a time of pandemic with society elbowing one another in supermarkets for rolls toilet paper seemed a good time to chase a rabbit about courage and trepidation. If you read this far, thanks, I guess, and if you're not reading this now, well, I don't much care.

Fabersham.

[chefzombie]

escalators. spiders. stinging insects. and dying before my husband.