What's Your Biggest Fear?
My worst nightmare is being trapped in an enclosed space with lots of bugs. It’s on my mind all the time: Recently, I dreamt a plate-sized spider with legs made of those weird fingery mushrooms was roaming my apartment and I couldn’t get away from it. What’s yours?
Provoked by a horrifying situation a certain celebrity found herself in this week, Gawker staffers started chatting about our absolute worst-case scenarios. For me, it’s the bugs. It could be cockroaches, big beetles, even houseflies if there were enough of them. I think about them tickling my skin, getting into my eyes, my mouth. I would absolutely rather be stuck in a room with a tiger than with an army of crawly, biting Belostomatidae.
Below, you’ll find an array of other writers’ fears, all of which are considerably less scary than mine, except for maybe Kelly’s. Below that, you are encouraged to submit your own in the comments. We’ll collect all the queasiest and most terrifying entries into a new post on Monday. Happy Halloween!
Ashley Feinberg
I am a very, very difficult person to make upset or squeamish or uncomfortable in almost any regard. And I don’t know if this counts as a fear necessarily, but the only thing that I find deeply upsetting for reasons I have yet to fully unwrap with my therapist is wads of loose hair, like such. A stray hair or two on its own does not bother me, but I find any collected mass of disembodied hair cripplingly repulsive. I am becoming increasingly nauseous just typing this.
Generally this doesn’t affect my daily life, but in college my roommate thought it was a “fun” “prank” to periodically remove all the hair from her and my other roommates’ brushes and wrap it around all the door handles. Sometimes I could convince her to remove the hair, other times I would have to cover my hands and arms in toilet paper if I wanted to escape. The only time it proved a real problem was right before an early morning class and right after I had spent the entire night drinking. In my rush to get out the door I reached for the handle without looking, grabbed what felt like a damp, matted ball of bristly contagion, looked down, and immediately vomited. Coincidentally, that was the last day of the “fun” “prank.”
Jordan Sargent
My worst nightmare is being in a plane that crashes into the ocean at night. Air France 447 is my worst fear, and if my fate is a similar death I ask God to strike me down right now.
Allie Jones
My worst fear is that someone will bomb my apartment. Also I worry about getting split in half by a malfunctioning elevator.
Rich Juzwiak
My worst fear besides losing a loved one and getting bedbugs again is having my eyes poked out, specifically by pegboard hooks (like the kind that they hang shit on in hardware stores). I have no real reason to fear these. My dad had a drug store when I was a kid, and I spent a lot of time in the toy aisle looking at things on those kind of hooks. I think maybe my brain just invented a reason to be uncomfortable.
I think the worst thing about getting an eye penetrated by one of those hooks is how dull the end is. It would require a lot of effort to actually push it in. I don’t mind movies that portray eyeball mutilation (see Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond). I just have a real big problem with those hooks. I actually am having a hard time writing this because I can’t stop thinking about those hooks. I need to go away now.
Kelly Conaboy
My biggest fear is being buried alive in a casket filled with bugs. Sort of a “two-for-one” fear, because it combines two fears: being buried alive and being trapped somewhere with horrible bugs.
Hamilton Nolan
Mine is being on a plane that’s very high up and then something crazy happens and it plummets all the way to earth and crashes. Or being on a boat that sinks in the middle of the ocean.
Gabrielle Bluestone
My worst nightmare is being awake during surgery.
Jay Hathaway
My fear is being unable to die. Because things could always get infinitely bad, but you’d be able to get out by dying. If you couldn’t die, someone could torture, shame, or embarrass you forever. Life as the nightmare from which you can never awaken.
Yeesh! Dredge up the most primally discomfiting aspects of your subconscious below.
