Phobias

Everyone has an irrational fear or two. I am, for example, afraid of spiders, even though I am much bigger than they are and have big stompy shoes with which to squash them. Tonight I spotted one in my pantry and froze in fear while it scuttled away under the cabinets. Now I keep thinking that it’s going to sneak back out tonight, make the long trek down the hall and through the living room, climb up into my bed, and…what? Wrap me up like Frodo in Shelob’s Lair? At worst, it will bite me and leave an itchy welt, and then I’ll roll over in my sleep and adios, arachnid. I know, logically, that I don’t need to worry about it. But I see something with eight legs and my animal hindbrain screams EEK EEK EEK RUN RUN RUN.

In a similar vein, I’ve only very recently overcome a years-long terror of thunderstorms. When I say “terror,” I mean “full-on anxiety attack” — shaking, sweating, racing heart, the whole deal. The house I grew up in was at the very top of a hill, in a part of the country known for thunderstorms, and not very long after we moved into it, the house next door got struck by lightning. Our house shook, and we all thought the shingles flying by outside were from our own roof, until we ran out and saw a hole the size of a compact car in the neighbors’ roof. After that, whenever it started to rain — even after we got lightning rods — my mother would insist we all gather in the kitchen, the room with the fewest windows, until the storm passed. She would even wake us up in the middle of the night and herd us downstairs, telling us it wasn’t safe to be in our bedrooms. And so my thunderstorm phobia was born. It’s taken a decade of living in San Francisco, where lightning is rare indeed, for me to stop trembling at the sight of dark rainclouds.

Today, I still don’t think I could sleep through a storm, but I do think I could manage to stay in my bed instead of wanting to crawl under it. Of course, that depends on whether there’s a spider down there.

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What are your irrational fears?

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