The daily fear
Most days, it’s easy to forget that I live in a place where at any moment the ground could literally shift beneath my feet. Today, not so much. It’s the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake, and the local paper is filled with reflections and predictions.
I wasn’t anywhere near San Francisco when the 1989 quake hit. I was working at a newspaper in a small town in central New Hampshire. But I was dating someone who had recently moved across country to take a job at the newspaper in Gilroy, Calif., the garlic capital of the world — and pretty much right on top of the quake’s epicenter. It was about 5pm his time, about 8pm my time, and we were on the phone, when suddenly we were interrupted by three short, sharp squeals like a car suddenly braking. And mid-sentence, he blurted, “Shit, I think we’re having an earthquake.”
The next 15 seconds were the most surreal conversation I’ve ever had: there I sat, in my living room, while 3,000 miles away someone delivered a terrified real-time narration of what was happening around him. The room was shaking, he could see cars in the parking lot of his apartment building actually bouncing off the ground, it’s still going, he was trying to get to a doorframe to stand under it but couldn’t walk straight, oh my god, oh my god, it’s not stopping, holy shit. I was yelling at him to put down the goddamn phone and go outside. And then it stopped and we were still connected, and I was saying “Are you all right? Are you all right?” while he was saying “I’m okay, I’m fine, I think I’m safe.” And we sat there for a minute just listening to each other breathe, and then he said, “Don’t hang up yet. If you hang up I know I won’t be able to make another call.” He gave me the phone numbers of a couple of his friends and asked me to call them and have them call other people and let everyone know he was all right. And then we sort of braced ourselves and said goodbye, not knowing how long it would be before we could talk again.
I thought about that call a lot when I moved west myself, ten years ago. I knew I needed to assume another earthquake would hit, that I should have emergency supplies and a first aid kit and a “go bag” (packed with the bare minimum I would need if I had to grab self and cat and run for my life). But here it is, a decade after my arrival and two decades after what everyone agrees was not the Big One, not nearly — and I’m not prepared. Not at all. I don’t have a go bag. I don’t have emergency supplies. I don’t have an extra week’s worth of my prescriptions. I don’t even have a pair of sturdy shoes and a flashlight next to my bed in case something happens in the middle of the night and I have to get the hell out of Dodge in the dark.
And that’s foolish. And I need to do something about it. Today is a good day to start.
Filed under Uncategorized, fears | Comments (2)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?
Filed under fears | Comments (3)What-huh-sana
So I started taking yoga classes back in January at this little place a few blocks from me. What I like best about it, other than the fact that it’s a 5-minute walk away, is that it’s really small. As in, I don’t think you could squeeze more than 10 people in there. The biggest class I’ve attended had eight, and it felt a little crowded. Usually, classes are five or six people, which is perfect — small enough that nobody gets lost in the crowd. I like being able to ask whether I’m doing something right or say, “Sorry, I don’t know what that is,” when the instructor rattles off the name of a pose I haven’t done before.
On the other hand, Continue reading »
Filed under fears, triumphs | Comment (0)Imaginary audience
Beginning to tell people that this blog exists: scary!
Look, I write for a living, and I’m a big enough ham that I have no fear of public speaking. But I’m imagining an audience, and don’t tell me it’ll help if I imagine them in their underwear, because people online in their underwear is just a little too much of a cliché even for me.
What’s interesting is that one of my friends reacted to this blog by saying, “I hope you have less anxiety about things as time goes on.” I don’t really think of myself as an anxious person, just one who’s trying to become more adventurous. But I guess being willing to take more risks requires having less anxiety, so…it’s all of a piece. I just swear, I’m not a Nervous Nellie. Don’t think that for a minute.
And put your pants on! Geez.
Filed under fears | Comment (1)Mashed flat
I was originally planning to start this blog on my birthday, which is still almost three weeks away. Then something happened that put me right smack up against an entire panoply of major fears all at once, so I figured there’s no time like the present. In short: I had a mammogram on Thursday morning, as one does when one reaches a Certain Age. It was my second mammogram ever. And on Thursday afternoon, I got the kind of phone call you really don’t want to get, the one where your doctor tells you there was something on the mammogram that wasn’t there the previous time, and would you please call this number to schedule a follow-up at your earliest opportunity?
Filed under fears | Comments (2)