When I was younger, I was afraid of a lot of things. In fact, I still am afraid of a lot of things. My worst fear for a while was the dark. If any dark door way was opened, I wouldn’t walk passed it. It was really more like some kind of weird superstition that was constantly on my mind from sundown to sunrise. It seems silly now, but I was also afraid to even change my shirt because I would have to close my eyes for a second. I imagined that as I lifted my shirt, someone would be standing right to me and would try to hurt me. Actually, to this day, I don’t like being in a dark room by myself. I have paranoia that I’ll see a shadow of something or someone. I’m not sure where this fear comes from. It could be that I watched a lot of paranormal movies as a child. I remember feeling the chills all over my body and the cold feeling leaving goosebumps in it’s wake. When I was watching scary movies, I would always pull my feet right next up on the couch, as if my feet being closer to my body would protect me from impending doom.

Ladders could send my mind spiraling down a pit of fear. The second I put my feet on the second or third step, a sense of dread would encompass me. Looking up would be scary, but looking down would be a nightmare. My fears on ladders would start at the step that was about 4 feet up, which is very unreasonable for most people. Heights, in general, are always a terror filled feat for me. When walking up the stairs in a large open house, if I look over the rails, I feel as if I start to hallucinate. Suddenly, the floors below me begin to spin together and blend. Often, I have to sit down just to stop my heart from beating out of my chest.

To add to my impressive resume of fears, I have quite a few more. My eyeballs ache from looking at someone else’s. If I were to see someone pulling down their skin to reveal the pinky-red veiny area under their eye, my skin would crawl. At the eye doctor, I feel my stomach toss and turn. The white walls are harsh and the disinfectant smell makes my throat burn. It is not the unfortunate look and smell of the room that makes me quiver, but the poster on the wall. I see cataracts, glaucoma, and multiple growths and sties. The eyes stare lifelessly into mine and I look away when I can’t take it anymore. When the optometrist notices my worries, he makes sure he skips over eye disease education. He knows that the disturbing images are burned into my mind and I would be sure to take care of my eyes.

One of my greatest fears is failing a task. For school, anxiety takes over when I attempt to take a test. I study, I prepare, yet when the test is in front of me, something inside of me changes. My heart starts to beat irregularly and my hands start to shake. If I’m typing on a keyboard for a test or assignment, all of the wrong letters start pouring onto the page, despite my best attempt. If it is handwritten, you won’t be able to read a single word of the page of scribbles. Even after the test is over, the fear will still be burned into my mind like an imprint. I can literally feel sweat bead and drip down my neck. To try to aid my fear, I seem to take long breaks between subjects, which just causes me to be unproductive. Once I am unproductive, my anxiety sets in once again for fear of failing. It is really all a big counterproductive vicious cycle. It is not only school work, my fear of failure is evident everywhere, especially at work. I want to do good at things and feel terrible if I am bad at something. Working in retail, there are so many people giving you demands and you want to please them all. It is impossible to try to please your managers, customers, and co-workers, since they all want different things from you. My anxiety is always sky high at work and makes me feel like I could collapse at any moment.