What’s your biggest fear?
My answer:
I have such an abundance of fears that it’s hard to say which one is biggest. Social anxiety’s definitely huge, but it depends on a lot of things and sometimes it’s less scary than others, or more manageable anyway, for no apparent reason. Then there’s this thing I call sensory anxiety, which I’ve generally gotten used to live with and it can also vary immensely in intensity, but it can be absolutely creepifying at times. My sensory anxiety is kind of connected with sleep paralysis, so that counts in here too. What’s particularly scary is this sleep paralysis/sensory anxiety “friend” of mine, known as “Ian” on this blog, about whom I wrote a short story on here, but I don’t tell his real name to anyone. He’s extremely scary and I always have a sick conviction at the back of my brain that he’s actually real and that some day I’ll get to experience his realness properly. As for actually recognised specific phobias, out of those that I’ve had emetophobia (fear of vomit) has always been the worst, though it’s not nearly as scary as it used to be for me in the past, most of the time anyway. Another thing that I have a fair bit of fear around is all things neurodegenerative, the possibility that I could end up having a neurodegenerative disease at some point, like Alzheimer’s (well, it doesn’t have to necessarily be a neurodegenerative disease, a TBI would be scary too but neurodegenerative diseases sound like something that’s particularly difficult to have any control over), and lose my brains as a result. My brains are like my fortress or something, so it would be a hopeless situation for me. And while usually it feels like vomit is scarier because it happens to more people and is more likely to happen, plus I’m also scared of it happening to anyone else, not just me, brain damage, of whatever nature, isn’t something that happens to everyone and it doesn’t seem like I’m at a particularly high risk in any way, as there hasn’t been anyone in my family as far as I know with this sort of thing. Yet on the other hand the brain damage stuff has way longer and nastier consequences. So I can’t say which one is scarier.
How about your fear? 🙂
My Inner MishMash 
Running out of money.
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I agree that it’s very scary.
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My answer used to be the fear of falls because I spent most of my life falling like a tree but your words evolved it. I’d say I’m scared of being misaligned with my neurological system because that is what has always caused my falls. And,yes, living with brain damage keeps you on your toes. It gets unpredictable and nobody can sense it but you.
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This makes a lot of sense.
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Out of officially-recognized phobias, my worst one would be poison. It’s bad enough that, when my husband had a poisonous plant on our balcony back in our apartment several years ago, I refused to go onto the balcony out of fear that I’d accidentally touch the plant. Out of more general fears, I have so many but the fear of abandonment and the fear of deteriorating physically would have to compete for first place.
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I’d imagine that the fear of poison could get in the way of just living quite a lot. I can relate to it in that poisonous things of course can make you vomit, so I once did have such a phase where I was very scared that I’m going to eat something that is poisonous.
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Huh. My biggest fear? Hmm…. I don’t know! Weirdness. Hmm… oh, okay. I guess I live in fear that things will go so disastrously wrong in my life that I lose the ability to cope. Like a string of disasters happening when I’m already down. Like, I’m really really upset, I can’t cope, so I go to the grocery store to buy something and I get in a confrontation with someone and then I just go so far off the deep end that there’s no fixing it. Or I’m devastated and vulnerable and then the house burns down, that sort of thing. I worry that I can’t or won’t be able to cope with too much bad luck all at once thrown at me. Sometimes when I go to the store and I’m feeling vulnerable like I was yesterday, I have to take extra precautions to avoid grocery store employees and that sort of thing. When I’m vulnerable, I don’t have good control and I can’t cope. Now that’s scary!
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That’s a very understandable fear, I think. It seems so easy that when one thing goes wrong, loads of other things will follow, and then it can be seriously difficult to cope with all that at once.
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Not being good enough 😦
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It sounds like a horrible fear, as it’s so subjective whether one is good enough or not, and our brains will always come up with stuff we could do better.
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One of my biggest fears is wasps and bees, being stung, as I’e not been stung, but even having them anywhere near me, I freak out. Another is a fear of the dark, or of silence, I have to have noise at all times, I don’t do silence!
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I’m scared of wasps too, and for me I think it’s actually precisely BECAUSE I was stung, once when I was a very small kid and then years later twice in a relatively short amount of time. But it also makes a lot of sense that you’re scared of them because of never having been stung. Bees don’t really scare me though because they’ve never done anything nasty to me and I don’t think they’re as aggressive.
Yeah silence can be super creepy for me too, and Sofi has a similar-looking problem with the dark as I do with silence so we get you there haha.
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