Irrational Fears Rationalized

I admit it.  I am a fearful person.  I get nervous and scared easily.  Sometimes my response to fear is uncontrolled laughter and excessive chattiness.  A slightly less pleasant response is sweaty eyebrows and pits.  The third response is snot running down my face sobbing.  For example, I do not like to sit next to strangers in a movie theatre.  I can't stand it when it is crowded and as a result Amie and I have gone to excessive lengths to outsmart the computer when selecting our reserved tickets at LHM theaters (but that's another blog entry). This blog entry is designated to situations that have prompted the third response. 

My biggest fear began at an early age and continues to this day.  Snakes.  I hate them.  I vividly remember waking up in my top bunk bed screaming because a snake was in my bed.  I was unable to move and just sat there crying until my dad came and ripped off the bedspread which revealed not a ball python, but a roll of masking tape.  How a roll of masking tape made its way onto the top bunk? I'll never know, but that is when the fear really began to materialize.  It didn't help matters when we would traipse through the gully on my way to school and encounter snakes sunning themselves on the path. One of the worst snake related memories came when I was in Mr. Allen's AP biology class as a sophomore at Alta.  He had a giant python in the back of the room and having taken biology as a freshman I was able to witness two years worth of monthly "feedings." Sometimes rats, sometimes chickens, but the all-time worst was the white rabbit.  Now I had never heard a bunny make a sound up until this point but upon being stalked, snared, and strangled, by the python the bunny let out a blood curdling scream that haunts me to this day. Think Hannibal Lechter, "Do you hear the lam

bs Clarice?" Shiver. Mr. Allen mercifully realized that this was not going to be good so he stuck his hand in the cage and stuck his thumb in the rabbit's eye to kill it instantly.  I learned a lot that year in biology. My worst encounter with a snake came when I was walking in the foothills behind the U. with Sharon.  We liked to take this trail above Red Butte Gardens and we were just about at the end of the loop which would bring us back home when a gigantic rattlesnake at least three inches around was coiled and shaking its rattler.  I froze.  So did Sharon.  Eventually the snake uncoiled and slide off into the bushes but I couldn't unfreeze.  I could not proceed across the path and despite being only a few minutes from home we had to turn around and take the loop back the other direction.  It was terrifying.  This fear is so rational it could sink its fangs into me.

A second fear I have is falling into deep holes.  I would always avoid walking over manhole covers in the street or on sidewalks because it just creeped me out.  I admitted that this fear was pretty irrational until one day while working as a nanny I was outside helping one of the kids learn to ride a bike.  You know the drill.  I was running behind holding onto the seat helping her to

 balance when she got mad at me because I let go.  The reason?  I had unknowingly stepped on a manhole cover.  The problem.  The manhole cover wasn't sealed properly and my left leg went straight down into the hole skinning my shin on the way down. This resulted in another irrational fear becoming rationalized.  

A third fear that I hope never becomes rationalized is nuclear winter.  I think having grown up in the 70s/80s and having watched The Day After (The one where Steve Guttenberg is caught in a nuclear blast, loses all his hair, and must defend his family from a hungry hammer wielding radiation burned psycho)  has made me a little overly sensitive.  But I was in the movie theatre with some friends watching The Sum of All Fears  and I started bawling when a nuclear bomb went off and radioactive snow started to fall. Yikes.

Finally, Amie alerted me to the fact that killer bees have made their way to Utah.  My fear of killer bees began back in the day when they used to have Friday night fright night on channel 13, but then it moved to a Saturday matinee and they would show movies like Something Wicked this Way Comes, Carrie, The Towering Inferno, and The Swarm. So in the swarm this colony of killer bees surrounded people and they couldn't get away.  If they tried to get in their car the bees would surround the vehicle, come in through the vents, and sting you dead.  You couldn't run because they would swarm you.  You couldn't hide.  Your only hope was to jump in water but then they'd just hover over the water waiting to sting you when you came up for air so either you drowned or you got stung.  I felt relatively safe knowing that killer bees did not live in Utah, but every now and again I'd hear reports that swarms were slowly moving north.  I pretty much eliminated the possibility of every visiting Texas once I read a news report that they had be spotted there, so now I guess St. George is out too because some yahoo was keeping them as pets.  

This entry has gone on way longer than expected.  If you made it this far, I'm sorry for stealing precious moments of your life to reveal what clearly is a cry for help.  My next google search will be to find a good psychiatrist who is on my medical plan.  I'm sure they'll approve my visit. I'll just need to fax them a copy of this post.  

Got any irrational fears?  I'd love to hear them. Misery loves company -- or at least fraidy cats do.