At some point in our lives, we all get scared of something. Spiders, bees, elevators, flying, Martin Mull...there's always something that gives us the shivers and quivers. I've found that the best way to cope with a phobia is to talk about it. It helps me, and I'm sure it'll help you.
So spill, buddy. What's your biggest phobia?
When I was a youngin' (~10 years ago. Ha!), I was always afraid of everything, up to and including my own shadow. I was tormented by the kids in my daycare during elementary school, so that was on my nerves. Throw in the phobias, and that pretty much did me in for K-5. My two biggest fears were the Emergency Alert System and fire alarms. Yeah, funny, huh? I'll explain the former because it's easier, then I'll attempt to BS an excuse for the latter.
I used to have a crippling fear of the Emergency Alert System. I think I equated the red screen that took over my TV, the scary alert tone, and the creepy voice to imminent doom and death. It would get to the point where I wouldn't watch TV in fear of the thing going off, and having the world implode around me. It wore off pretty quickly after I got into my double digits, so that wasn't bad.
Then came the other one. The fear of fire alarms.
Yeah, I know they save lives. Spare me the lecture, Dr Seuss. I don't exactly know why, when and where this happened, but somewhere along the line at a very early age, I developed this horrific fear of fire alarms. In elementary school, any time I knew we would have a fire drill (the dumb fucks always used to tell us the exact time), I would get nervous beyond words. My heart would start pounding, I'd sweat like a Coke can in August, and half the time I'd be so scared that I'd start tearing up. It got worse through elementary school, and it was to the point where I would be so scared in class when they told us we were about to have a fire drill, that they'd have to remove me from the building before they set the alarms off. I mellowed out a bit in middle and high school, but I was still scared shitless of the alarm and if I knew we were going to have a drill that day, I'd fake being sick so I could stay home and miss it.
Even when they didn't tell us, I always had a hunch. The principals had sort of a pattern, and I figured it out pretty quickly. We'd never have fire drills when it was raining/snowing, when there was a special event (concert, news crew, etc) or guest speaker in the building, and they never did them during class changes or lunch periods. They preferred doing them at 745, 845 or 930 in the morning, and at 1245 or 120 in the afternoon. They did one fire drill a week in September, and one a month after that. Knowing all that, we had a pretty good idea when they would conduct one. I'm fine if I don't know it's going to go off (completely oblivious I mean), but if I even have a slight feeling that they were going to go off, I'd get nervous as hell.
I always called it "a fear of being startled," because that's essentially what it boiled down to. I'm fine a second after the alarm goes off, but in the time leading up to the activation, I'm a nervous wreck. I hate being startled. I hate it. If I watch someone blow up a balloon, and I know that it's going to pop, the same thing happens to me. I get nervous of the impending sudden loud noise. That's what happens with fire alarms. I know the loud noise is going to scare the shit out of me, and that makes me nervous.
When I first got to college, the fear subsided quite a bit because the fire alarms down here are like a notch above an old oven timer. But back home in North Carolina, the apartments we just moved into were built in 2005. Sometime between 2000 and 2005, North Carolina passed a law that requires buildings like apartments and condos and stuff to have a sprinkler and fire alarm system. Well, one half of the complex, built in 2000, has neither of these. The other half, built in 2005, has them. Guess which half I live in? Yeah.
Back in July, we'd lived there for about 3 weeks, and they went off one evening. Something happened to the system while they were power washing, and some of the equipment in the walls got screwed up. The alarm kept going off every 2 or 3 minutes for over an hour that night, and my nerves were so frayed that I was physically sick to my stomach for a day or so. The apartment manager said that she shut the system off until they could replace what got fried by the power washers.
It took them 3 weeks to fix the system. The apartment manager went out of her way to tell me that the alarms would "probably go off all day" once they reactivated the system. So until they got them fixed, I was a nervous wreck in my own home. I would think about something else and then get nervous again, because no matter what I did, my thoughts always turned back to "when are they going to go off?" I couldn't even leave the apartment and go anywhere, because there was nowhere to go. We live in Podunk, population: me and cows.
I know by this point you're about ready to call the white coats to come down here and have me committed. After talking about my old EAS phobia in DK4 (yes, the EAS thing is a copy/paste from a comment I made in DK4 if you noticed. Sue me.), I felt like getting you guys to spill too. I have no idea how to stop being afraid of it. I always told myself that I would "grow out of it." Well, I turned 19 two weeks before the "incident" happened, and obviously that didn't work. I looked it up, and apparently I'm far from being the only person with this fear. The named phobia for it is "phonophobia," a fear of loud noises, but that's not what it is. I couldn't give two craps about loud noises, it's when a loud noise happens all of a sudden that gets me. Hell, they even have a damn WikiHow article about it.
But, I don't give a shit if others are afraid of it too. I am. That's all that matters. Me. Me me me. Marsha Marsha Marsha. And I can't fix it, so that makes it worse. I also used to be able to escape the fire alarms at school by going home. Nope, not anymore. They're in my home. There's nowhere left for me to go to be "safe" so to speak.
Ugh. If I make it to 30 alive with all of my hair, no drinking problems, and 0 heart attacks, I'll be freakin' amazed.
End rant.
So...I spilled my guts and got everything off my chest. Your turn. What's your biggest fear, rational or not?