10-day meme: Day 3
8 fears:
+ Disappointing others
This is probably the first fear that I was ever aware of apart from physically-related fears (such as going to the dentist). I basically go through life with the assumption that I fall short; it's my default setting. When I don't know people well enough yet, I have a lot of trouble speaking spontaneously in their presence because I'm afraid that the words that come out of my mouth will be wrong, or will come out in a way I don't like (I despise my voice). I'm trying to gauge if they're right. I was always agonized about not being good enough for my parents, not being the model of success that they want. I don't think everyone understands this about me, because I can seem "stuck-up" or "arrogant," which I undoubtedly am...but at the same time I approach almost every situation with the greatest of humility, so that it's as if I'm meekly crawling up and just laying myself down on the sacrificial altar, knowing that I'm deficient and I deserve nothing. The merest idiot is above me in some evaluations.
+ Hallucinations
This may be misleading, because I've never hallucinated or anything close to it. But I have a vague fear of falling apart in the face of a hallucination or seeing something that isn't there or that I can't explain. It gets my imagination sparking, and I can just imagine the extreme psychological reaction and horrible shrieking that would ensue if I ever saw anything that didn't properly belong to the world of reality. For some reason I've always believed that I wouldn't really be able to handle it. My boyfriend has hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, for him it's usually a sort of dark mass of insects or bugs or something like that, which is very common - he sees them roiling in a tower in the space where the door is cracked open, pushing it further open, the shadows and dancing dark dots on the ceiling resolve into gigantic bugs, he sees cobwebs with large spiders hanging above him that seem to get ever closer and he's afraid that the silken veils will touch his face. When he has these hallucinations he's actually awake, or at least mostly awake, but for a few moments he sees these things that aren't real, and goes rigid staring at them appalled, or struggling to get away, it's like he's possessed with a sudden, visceral delusion and it's unnerving to witness. I wake up to find him slapping at his shoulders to get the bugs off. I think if I ever experienced something like that or sleep paralysis, I would be really shaken.
+ Torture
Thanks to movies like Audition, this theme really gets under my skin. It's not a logical fear, it's not like I'm actually afraid of someone spiriting me away and torturing me with sadistic pleasure for interminable periods, though it obviously happens sometimes, and I'm always riveted by those stories; but again, it's sort of a thing I can really get into in my imagination, there are just so many things that people can do to each other to cause extreme, horrific physical pain and agony... They could break each of your fingers one by one, staple your eyelids to your brows, cut off your eyelids, wrench out your teeth with pliers, cut out your tongue and make you swallow it, carve out your eyes, sew your lips shut, stretch your arms until they pull out of the sockets, bore holes through your kneecaps and pass heavy chains through them...and on and on... I mean, thinking about torture is kind of like a game without end, you can keep on thinking of new and increasingly horrific possibilities and combinations.
+ Isolation
I'm afraid of this on different levels. I often have this recurring feeling of fear that no one really understands me. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm an Enneagram Type 4, and that maybe means I tend to exaggerate differences between myself and others and am focused on distinguishing rather than grouping us together, but I usually feel like I'm floating separate from everyone else. I know that everyone says this, but I truly feel like I'm very different from almost everyone. I feel like they can't enter into my sphere of existence. And I mostly feel things in shades and subtle combinations of emotions that I don't think most people can ordinarily relate to that readily, and so I'm basically on my own as far as my experience of life goes. Like, often the feeling arises when I realize that someone else I'm speaking to really doesn't see the way I see things, their perceptions are cruder and crueler maybe than I'd imagined. I used to think I was a cynic but I don't anymore, I'm disgusted by certain kinds of cynicism, I think pragmatism is a kind of cynicism.
When I was younger, I used to get into these moods of paranoia at night in my bed sometimes (it doesn't happen as much anymore). It wasn't really related to reality, it wasn't like I was actually afraid a person was coming into my home or something, it was just a dreadful, neurotic, dark, and disturbed mood that sort of arose from my alienating feelings and fueled itself, an anxiety paper-chain. It came from being trapped in my dark room at night, with parents next door that I never felt a real emotional connection to and who wouldn't understand about my fears and would only be annoyed if I woke them up and told them I was so scared. It came from being trapped in the dark room of my mind, with the same thoughts running on and on like gears grinding against each other, and being in that mood for hours and hours. I always somehow knew that if I just stepped outside, if I wandered around in the dead of night in the cold fresh air, the mood would dissipate, the fear would just go away. Because, like I said, the paranoia isn't actually about something bad happening to me, I sort of have a naive trust of the outside world. It comes from a deeper and darker and less explicable place than that. I'm just a very dark person in many ways, and I have a panoply of anxieties and strange, disturbing, half-told fears. I feel like no one could save me from falling into the abyss. Who shall take you away from the tyranny of your own mind? When are you ever going to be really quit of it all until you slip your envelope of flesh and your brain stops churning?
+ Scientific advancement
This fear is less easy to explain. I feel like most people nowadays have a higher tolerance for scientific advancements and speculations than I do, they're willing to accept a lot more for the sake of prolonging and preserving life, while I'm more conflicted and disturbed by a variety of possibilities. There's something I hate about the curiosity of the scientist and his motivation which just keeps pushing onwards.
+ Never finding a career I like
I really despair of my ever finding a place for myself in the work world where I'll ever really feel comfortable.
+ Getting old
Ugh, I'm really afraid of this. I'm already feel like I'm getting older than I want to be.
+ A downward spiral
I'm afraid of things turning for the worse rather than getting better. I'm afraid that I'll never feel happier and more able than I do right now. That I'll always be tortured with dissatisfaction and these petty issues that clog up my mind and take up all my emotional energy. I'm afraid of never fulfilling anything I want to do and become. I hope that it'll get better. Of course I do.
+ Disappointing others
This is probably the first fear that I was ever aware of apart from physically-related fears (such as going to the dentist). I basically go through life with the assumption that I fall short; it's my default setting. When I don't know people well enough yet, I have a lot of trouble speaking spontaneously in their presence because I'm afraid that the words that come out of my mouth will be wrong, or will come out in a way I don't like (I despise my voice). I'm trying to gauge if they're right. I was always agonized about not being good enough for my parents, not being the model of success that they want. I don't think everyone understands this about me, because I can seem "stuck-up" or "arrogant," which I undoubtedly am...but at the same time I approach almost every situation with the greatest of humility, so that it's as if I'm meekly crawling up and just laying myself down on the sacrificial altar, knowing that I'm deficient and I deserve nothing. The merest idiot is above me in some evaluations.
+ Hallucinations
This may be misleading, because I've never hallucinated or anything close to it. But I have a vague fear of falling apart in the face of a hallucination or seeing something that isn't there or that I can't explain. It gets my imagination sparking, and I can just imagine the extreme psychological reaction and horrible shrieking that would ensue if I ever saw anything that didn't properly belong to the world of reality. For some reason I've always believed that I wouldn't really be able to handle it. My boyfriend has hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, for him it's usually a sort of dark mass of insects or bugs or something like that, which is very common - he sees them roiling in a tower in the space where the door is cracked open, pushing it further open, the shadows and dancing dark dots on the ceiling resolve into gigantic bugs, he sees cobwebs with large spiders hanging above him that seem to get ever closer and he's afraid that the silken veils will touch his face. When he has these hallucinations he's actually awake, or at least mostly awake, but for a few moments he sees these things that aren't real, and goes rigid staring at them appalled, or struggling to get away, it's like he's possessed with a sudden, visceral delusion and it's unnerving to witness. I wake up to find him slapping at his shoulders to get the bugs off. I think if I ever experienced something like that or sleep paralysis, I would be really shaken.
+ Torture
Thanks to movies like Audition, this theme really gets under my skin. It's not a logical fear, it's not like I'm actually afraid of someone spiriting me away and torturing me with sadistic pleasure for interminable periods, though it obviously happens sometimes, and I'm always riveted by those stories; but again, it's sort of a thing I can really get into in my imagination, there are just so many things that people can do to each other to cause extreme, horrific physical pain and agony... They could break each of your fingers one by one, staple your eyelids to your brows, cut off your eyelids, wrench out your teeth with pliers, cut out your tongue and make you swallow it, carve out your eyes, sew your lips shut, stretch your arms until they pull out of the sockets, bore holes through your kneecaps and pass heavy chains through them...and on and on... I mean, thinking about torture is kind of like a game without end, you can keep on thinking of new and increasingly horrific possibilities and combinations.
+ Isolation
I'm afraid of this on different levels. I often have this recurring feeling of fear that no one really understands me. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm an Enneagram Type 4, and that maybe means I tend to exaggerate differences between myself and others and am focused on distinguishing rather than grouping us together, but I usually feel like I'm floating separate from everyone else. I know that everyone says this, but I truly feel like I'm very different from almost everyone. I feel like they can't enter into my sphere of existence. And I mostly feel things in shades and subtle combinations of emotions that I don't think most people can ordinarily relate to that readily, and so I'm basically on my own as far as my experience of life goes. Like, often the feeling arises when I realize that someone else I'm speaking to really doesn't see the way I see things, their perceptions are cruder and crueler maybe than I'd imagined. I used to think I was a cynic but I don't anymore, I'm disgusted by certain kinds of cynicism, I think pragmatism is a kind of cynicism.
When I was younger, I used to get into these moods of paranoia at night in my bed sometimes (it doesn't happen as much anymore). It wasn't really related to reality, it wasn't like I was actually afraid a person was coming into my home or something, it was just a dreadful, neurotic, dark, and disturbed mood that sort of arose from my alienating feelings and fueled itself, an anxiety paper-chain. It came from being trapped in my dark room at night, with parents next door that I never felt a real emotional connection to and who wouldn't understand about my fears and would only be annoyed if I woke them up and told them I was so scared. It came from being trapped in the dark room of my mind, with the same thoughts running on and on like gears grinding against each other, and being in that mood for hours and hours. I always somehow knew that if I just stepped outside, if I wandered around in the dead of night in the cold fresh air, the mood would dissipate, the fear would just go away. Because, like I said, the paranoia isn't actually about something bad happening to me, I sort of have a naive trust of the outside world. It comes from a deeper and darker and less explicable place than that. I'm just a very dark person in many ways, and I have a panoply of anxieties and strange, disturbing, half-told fears. I feel like no one could save me from falling into the abyss. Who shall take you away from the tyranny of your own mind? When are you ever going to be really quit of it all until you slip your envelope of flesh and your brain stops churning?
+ Scientific advancement
This fear is less easy to explain. I feel like most people nowadays have a higher tolerance for scientific advancements and speculations than I do, they're willing to accept a lot more for the sake of prolonging and preserving life, while I'm more conflicted and disturbed by a variety of possibilities. There's something I hate about the curiosity of the scientist and his motivation which just keeps pushing onwards.
+ Never finding a career I like
I really despair of my ever finding a place for myself in the work world where I'll ever really feel comfortable.
+ Getting old
Ugh, I'm really afraid of this. I'm already feel like I'm getting older than I want to be.
+ A downward spiral
I'm afraid of things turning for the worse rather than getting better. I'm afraid that I'll never feel happier and more able than I do right now. That I'll always be tortured with dissatisfaction and these petty issues that clog up my mind and take up all my emotional energy. I'm afraid of never fulfilling anything I want to do and become. I hope that it'll get better. Of course I do.