Rational and Irrational Fears

Being up front about my mental illnesses is something that did not take very long for me to do. It sounds like I'm bragging, but I'm not. Thankfully, I was born in an era where having depression and anxiety wasn't a reason to lock me up in an institution- at least not unless it gets really bad, and I have no reason to think it will.

Some people were raised in a time where the attitude was, "We don't talk about that sort of thing," but I've made it a personal goal of mine to be open about it. Mental illness is just that, an illness. Sometimes it's like a cold- you treat it and it goes away on its own eventually, but there isn't a known, permanent cure. Sometimes it's like having arthritis- you have to deal with it whenever the weather is bad, or whenever something in your environment happens to trigger pain. And sometimes it's like being terminally ill. You have to live with it, knowing that you can't do anything about it, and you just have to wait for it to end.

I don't, of course, mean to say that depression and anxiety are fatal. They don't have to be, and many people live with them successfully. But it is fatal for some, when the sickness becomes so bad that it alters the way they think and they find that dying sounds easier than living.

I've had those moments. I've had majorly suicidal thoughts at least twice in my life. But by calling my parents at three in the morning or by curling up in my bed with my bears and some music, I've been able to stave off the urge.

(Please note that I'm fine at the moment, and that you don't need to talk to me about it because I am thankfully not at a point in my life where dying sounds better than living. It's a relief, to be honest, because somebody else would have to clean up the mess it would make and I really don't want to burden anybody else that way.)

I did, in fact, have a point with this. What I'm trying to get at, in my spectactularly long-winded way, is that mental illness, both depression and anxiety, are like any other illnesses, and that they have parts that you can't just explain away.

Anxiety, specifically, has some unpleasant parts that have no reason to them. For instance, I am afraid of a lot of things that I wasn't, formerly. Some things do have vague reasons behind them, but some don't.

So here's a list of my irrational fears, some with possible explanations and others with nothing at all.

1. Opening the oven and getting things out of it when they're hot. I don't really have a clue about this one. I don't have any traumatic childhood burns, mostly because I was a good child and listened to my mother when she told me that the oven was hot. But I really don't like to open the oven and get things out. I can do it, but I really, really do not like it, and it always takes me a minute or two after I've opened the oven to try and get out the thing inside of it. It's dumb, I hate it, and it's one of the primary reasons that I don't like baking or cooking as well as my mother does.
2. Talking to boys. This one has a logical reason. About two years ago I was an idiot about a boy I knew and got my heart broken, which was one of the major catalysts for my depression and anxiety. They would have happened anyway, but I stupidly invested a lot of emotional energy into the relationship and when it fell apart, I became unglued at the seams and I cried and worried all the time and slept a lot and then one night I thought maybe dying would be better than living, and then I realized I had a problem so I called my parents at 3 am and sobbed at them over the phone. In retrospect, it probably would have been a good idea to leave college at that point, but the boy in question was at home and I was not, and I wanted to keep my distance. This resulted in me staying at college and only coming home for Christmas, for the next two years. And that resulted in me having a mental breakdown and not being able to finish college. Basically, talking to boys ruined my life, and I'm not terribly eager to start that whole thing up again.
3. Walking on busy roads. I lived in a college town, and this was something that annoyed me more than it scared me. I used to have a job where I got up at 4 am to make sandwiches, and one morning I jaywalked across the street at 4 am because there was no traffic, but it turned out there was and I came within two feet of being hit by a minivan. The driver apologized profusely, but I was just kind of in shock and I was like, "Nah dude, it's okay, it's fine," and ever since then, the sound of a car behind me makes me all tense and jumpy. I hate it and I wish it would stop but it hasn't yet in three years so it looks like I'm stuck with it.
4. Being in crowded places. I go to church every week with my family. I go because I believe and because it does me good and because it's somewhere I want to be. But despite the comfort I get from my faith in God, it's sometimes really hard to be at church. There are too many people. There are social pressures. People want to ask me what I'm doing with my life, a question which frustrates me almost as much as it does my siblings, and they want to tell me about their own lives, and I wish I could apologize in advance for this but with like ninety-five percent of the people who want to tell me things, I don't care. I have to not care about things, because when I do, the anxiety gets way, way worse. But people are sometimes too close and too loud and they want to get too personal and it's just like being stabbed in five different places at once. If I want to talk about what I'm feeling, I do it. Usually on the Internet or with people I consider important enough to share with. If I don't want to talk to you, I will smile vaguely and push you away with polite verbal nothings.
5. Bugs. We used to have regular ant infestations in our house. I am a bajillion times bigger than an ant. The little suckers scared the daylights out of me. I do not like ants, bees, wasps, hornets, stinkbugs, cicadas, or gypsy moth caterpillars. I can deal with flies and mosquitoes, but I am of the opinion that God could have left those out of the life cycle and nobody would have been the worse for it. They probably have some sort of purpose, but I honestly don't know what it is and I don't think it's more important than so many people getting malaria every year. I can deal with butterflies, but it feels irritable, like my skin is itching even if I'm not touching them. Moths just make me shriek and cover my hair and cry. Irrational, as I said. Spiders I can tolerate, due to the fact that they eat other bugs and also because they don't like people and I also don't like people. We have a lot in common.
6. Playing video games. Now don't get me wrong- I happen to love playing video games. But sometimes I'll be playing a game and something happens and my brain goes, "Aaaah. What is happening. This is hard. My fine motor skills have all committed seppuku. The graphics are so good that things are getting scary. I don't know if I can do this. I'm freaking out." This happens most commonly when I'm playing Zelda games, especially in a dungeon with wallmasters... Ahem, moving on.
7. Being alone. On the one hand, I don't like people and I hate being around them most of the time, with the exception of my immediate family who don't count as people people. On the other hand, I am really scared that someday I am going to end up as the last one in my family to be alive, ancient and a hundred and moldering with good health and forty cats. I would really not like to outlive all of them, because that would be sad and stuff. I also would not like to die as a single woman and I would also not like to die without having been kissed at least once or without having gone to England. I don't want to spend my life as a sad, lonely girl who worries too much. It would be nice, if not literally necessary, to be married and have kids.
8. People don't like me. Despite the fact that I don't like people all of the time, I am convinced about ninety-nine percent of the time that the people who say that they like me are just lying to make me feel better and that they actually only tolerate my existence because murder is illegal and because I don't have the resources to go somewhere else. I used to get especially paranoid about this in college, because I sort of followed my friends to whatever apartment complexes they wanted to live in, and I always felt like I was tagging along or that I was annoying or childish or that they didn't like me. This is something that used to compound with the depression and made my brain decide that nobody loved me and that I was worthless, and that led to the second occasion where I strongly considered suicide, which was approximately in late-August, early-September of this last year. Thankfully, I did no such thing.
9. Pain. It's safe to say that I have so far avoided most major pain in my life. I have never been bitten by any animal, I have never broken or sprained or twisted any limb of my body, I have never been stung by a bee, and I have never had kidney stones or given birth. But the ideas of them are things that I can imagine, and I have a very low tolerance for physical pain. My whole mind just goes, "NOPE, LET'S NOT," whenever I try to think about it. This is also the basic reason why I haven't ever given in to suicidal urges- because it would probably involve pain of some kind.
10. Driving. I held a driver's permit at the age of eighteen for approximately a year. I was able to learn the basics of driving a car around the neighborhood- steering, braking, gas pedal, turn signals. However, my teacher was my father, and any environment that is stressful to him causes him to radiate stress like a beacon. We tried leaving the neighborhood exactly once, and I almost steered into oncoming traffic. I promptly had a panic attack and refused to leave the neighborhood, and I pulled over (through the grace of God, I suppose) and made my father drive me home. I haven't tried to drive since. I'm going to be working on that next, hopefully with a driving school rather than my father. I love the man, but he is an impatient and worrisome driving teacher, and it was extremely scary and stressful.
11. Trampolines. My family and I went to a trampoline park in Utah once. Everything made me bounce too high and since I was two hundred and twenty pounds it felt like everything was going to break under me. There were also foam block pits, and I jumped into one like once and it felt like I was drowning and it took me like five minutes to get out. I would like to never experience that again, thank you.
12. Men in general. I'm not a feminist because I'm scared of men or anything like that. I'm a feminist because women have ample reason to be scared of men, with the whole, you know, terrifying statistic of one in six women being raped, higher numbers outside of America, and the whole thing where that Elliott Rodger dude wrote a manifesto about why women were inferior and then went and shot up a sorority, killing six women and five men- all because he was too much of a jerk to get laid. It sounds vulgar, but the reason that man killed eleven people is because women wouldn't sleep with him. I wouldn't say I'm scared of men specifically. I would say that it's really hard to feel safe when you've lived in a college town, carried pepper spray at four in the morning, and have occasionally indulged in late-night walks to the local elementary school to use the swings. It's really hard to feel safe in a town that jokes about a dude dressed in black who would run around groping women while they were exercising or who broke into a women's dormitory at three am and was, uh, touching himself, in front of girls. It's really hard to feel safe and secure when there's no way to tell that a man won't rape you, because most women are raped by somebody they know. It's really hard to feel safe and secure by being unattractive, because attractiveness has nothing to do with rape. Rape is an act of violence. It's hard to remember that being raped would not make me less of a person or less worthy, because there are people who blame women for being raped or who look down on women who have been raped, as though they were unclean or filthy because of a man's decision to commit a violent act for the sake of feeling powerful.
13. Nuclear war. I'm not afraid of dying of radiation sickness, funnily enough. I'm afraid of what happens if life as we know it comes to a shrieking halt and nobody can produce my antidepressants anymore. What do I do in a post-apocalyptic society without my medicine? My mother has a thing with her thyroid and has taken the same medicine for like twenty years. What does she do if nobody makes her medicine? My sister has epilepsy and takes like ten pills a day to keep from having awful seizures. What happens if nobody makes her medicine? The answer to that last one is the most traumatic, because my mother and I can live without our medicine- we'll just be tired and unpleasantly cranky all the time. But if my sister doesn't have her medicine, then she has lots and lots of seizures and it all results in brain damage and then one of those days she would choke on her own tongue and die or something, and I really have to stop thinking about this one right now.
14. Getting into a fight. On the one hand, I have theoretical knowledge of how to disable somebody. Knee to the groin, stomp on the instep or kick the shin with the point of your foot or your heel, dig fingernails into cuticles, pinch the web of skin between the forefinger and the thumb, smash the heel of your hand up into their nose, gouge eyes, etc, etc... but on the other hand, I have no idea how to actually deal with any of those things, really truly and physically. My brother took karate lessons and he could probably actually kill somebody if he needed to, but I probably couldn't even defend myself against a wet quilt, to be honest.
15. Flooded toilets. This used to be a regular occurrence in our house, mostly because there were three teenagers and everybody eats and we all ate a lot and there was consequently a lot of poop- but also because two of said teenagers were girls and girls use way more toilet paper than boys. My mother gave us all lessons on how to stop the toilet from flooding when it looks like it's going to flood, and I have used this practical knowledge many times, both at home and at college. I am practically a plumber, I know so much about toilets. But I still panic if one does flood, because my brain starts yelling, "EW GROSS THAT'S A LOT OF PEE GET AWAY GET ALL YOUR THINGS AWAY EVERYTHING IS GETTING GROSS AND GERMY NOW EW EW EW" and the rest of me is like "OH GRACIOUS GOD WHAT DO I DO AT A TIME LIKE THIS" and my body is caught between my brain and its natural reaction, which is to jump up and away and swear profusely. It's a very panicky feeling and I don't at all like it.
16. Throwing up. It's happened before, and I know the sensation fairly well at this point. But it really hurts my stomach and makes my mouth all raw and everything tastes gross for like an hour, even after you've brushed your teeth. I hate it and I'm afraid of it because of the pain.
17. Disappointing people. I used to be like, really good at existing. I was smart in high school, I was talented and learned things and remembered them, and I didn't have to study a whole lot because I was good at remembering things, and I did just fine. Depression and anxiety have changed that, and now I'm really bad at remembering things, at concentrating, at paying attention to what other people are saying, at paying attention to what my own body tells me beyond panic or emergency signals. And some people do not understand why I can't just fight it off. It doesn't work that way. I don't have control over my body. My thyroid has control over my body, but my thyroid is flawed because it doesn't make enough happy chemicals. And so people are like, "Oh, Sarah, you're so smart and talented!" And I'm like, "Yeah, no, I'm really not, I used to be really good at faking it but I have no actual idea how to do things." And nobody seems to believe me, until I try something and fail spectacularly and then they're all like, "I don't understand, you failed me, how could you fail me?" and then I go, "I TOLD YOU I WASN'T GOOD AT THINGS ANYMORE NOW PLEASE BELIEVE ME." They never do, of course, but I'm still afraid of it.
18. Getting my period in public. I've gotten to the point where I can tell instantly when it's started, and usually it happens at like four in the morning and I wake up and my brain goes, "Oh, great, that's more underwear ruined." But I'm still irrationally afraid of having my period and wearing pants and what happens if it soaks through... yeah, I'm not going into this anymore. I think there are some boys who might read this and I don't want to gross them out. (Not that they should be grossed out, due to the fact that it's a natural bodily function and we don't get grossed out at them when they stand up to pee. Except when they miss and get stains on the toilet or the floor. Blech.)
19. Really loud dogs. I don't mind if the dogs are small or big. I just hate when they're too loud, because my brain can't focus on anything else and I worry about presenting an unnecessary threat.
20. Anti-Semitism. See, the thing is that a lot of countries in Europe and even in South America have some political party or other that is basically neo-National-Socialism. Despite the fact that less than a hundred years ago the Nazis killed six million Jews. Anti-Semitism is still the most common form of hatred out there, more prevalent than hate crimes against women or persons of color or gay people. It might not seem that way in America, but it sure is that way in the rest of the world. And you know who gets targeted for Anti-Semitism? People who have Jewish names. And my name is Sarah Abramson- literally about as Jewish as you can get. If I were to live in Europe, I might be the recipient of hate crimes. The Holocaust was seventy-odd years ago and we're still doing the exact same crap, but pretending to be more horrified about it. How about no.

I am afraid of a lot of things. Some of those things make sense. Some of them do not. I can't really control what I'm afraid of and what I'm not, despite the whole not-making-sense thing. My soul is rational. My mind and body are not. 

What I am most afraid of at this point is myself. I am afraid of my own feelings of helplessness and sadness, of the quiet waves of dark and fog that threaten to overwhelm me at a moment's notice. I'm afraid of losing myself to this illness, and I'm afraid that I can't properly tell anybody about it. I'm afraid of the shadows of my soul, the dark places in me that rise and loom over my bed at night. I am afraid that I am not enough to overcome it, and I am afraid of what will happen if I cannot learn to cope with this.

I think it will be okay, though. Being afraid of myself means that I've learned how to live with fear, and it's entirely possible that someday I will be able to look fear in the face and say, "I am done with you," and watch it shrink and languish away into nothing. I think that someday I will remember how to be fearless, and I look forward to that day.