What scares you?

Everything else
22

Shuffling off this mortal coil and not even leaving skidmarks, not even in my underwear.

Translation - I’m not really overly fearful of dying, but being alone at the end game, leaving no legacy or lovers, friends or human beans to carry me on in their memories, that’s a real fear of mine.

23

I think this is true of many folks. It’s much easier to talk about physical stuff though, even if the fear is not quite as terrifying. I mean, ok, a giant rabid spider bear with dripping fangs and a copy of Guns & Ammo is pretty scary, but not as psychologically debilitating as like, to pick one of mine, the fear of ending up in a dreadful nursing home like my father in law.

24

I’m more afraid of people around me that I love being in pain or dying and me being powerless to stop it than I am about anything that happens to me directly. Watching a parent die to cancer as a child really taught me a number of lessons about what really hurts.

25

In no particular order

  • Flying, stinging insects, which I might have a deadly level allergy to (and have been avoiding ever since my first sting at age 6 in order not to find out)
  • People who hold conservative beliefs of basically any description
  • Extremely venomous spiders hanging out somewhere I’m going to stick my foot accidentally
  • Gun owners, people who are okay with the idea of there being gun owners, etc.
  • Ticks, specifically the ones that might give me a debilitating illness or allergy to red meat if I don’t notice them hiding amongst my fat folds soon enough
  • My girlfriend’s genuinely evil mother, especially given that she’s threatened at least one person with murder while holding a gun and whose first husband’s murder was never actually solved. . .
  • Basically being outside for any extended period of time since outside has both ticks and flying stinging insects
  • The possibility that I might accidentally use my higher-than-average-for-a-fat-ugly-geek charisma to subconsciously manipulate close friends/loved ones into doing things that I want that make them sad or uncomfortable
  • That Australian tree that stings you so bad you want to kill yourself for weeks on end
  • Ever having to get another buccal graft urethroplasty every fucking again my life has been absolute torment for three weeks straight and I get to enjoy at least two more please make it stop
  • A 404 page for https://forum.quartertothree.com that doesn’t ever resolve itself
  • Being truly, really alone, particularly in a romantic sense, insofar as I’ve been in one of two long-term relationships for all but about two weeks since 2001 and I genuinely cannot conceive of who I am as a person outside of the context of one
  • Brain aneurysms. You mean I can just fuckin’ get a headache and die a few minutes later with no warning or means of prevention at literally any time? What the entire shit, body?!
  • Little kids in movies. Like, mostly horror movies, but also, kind of, all movies
  • Needles, thanks to that time I was selling plasma to not be homeless and they took the blood out but the machine forgot to put it back in. . .
  • Smelling badly around other people and being judged for it
  • Being seen without my shirt by almost anyone
  • Ever having to work a job where I need to put in effort/try, because I’m not sure that my brain actually knows how to do that anymore and if my and my partner’s health and stability are ever reliant on my ability to be functional and productive at an even modest level we’re probably fucked beyond belief
  • The bigoted, misguided beliefs and thought patterns that still linger within my psyche, as-of-yet unconfronted, that might cause pain due to my lack of self-improvement
  • Anaphylaxis
  • The mortality of my friends and loved ones
  • Anyone ever finding, hacking into, and reading/widely sharing the contents of the LiveJournal that I maintained from 6th grade through the end of college

edit 1:

  • Accidentally killing myself or someone I love through any one of a number of simple-to-make cooking errors like cross-contamination or over-curing a meat

edit 2:

  • The possibility of a sort of anti-Batman-esque person using this list to design a series of perfect torments to cause me incredible anguish and eventually death
26

Being kidnapped by a psychopath that gets his jollies from slowly torturing middle aged women (oh fine, old women). Bugs or animals don’t bother me - I figure if they want to kill me they will do it relatively quickly.

That plus drowning or being buried alive just scare me so so much. Oddly I’ve been on boats all my life and love nothing more than sun bathing on the deck of anything that floats.

edit - wtf, that was oddly personal for me :D

27

Heights.

28

So, planning personalized Saw traps for each forum member, eh, @RichVR ? If I knew we were exchanging Christmas gifts, I would’ve gotten you something in return.

Anyway, my worst fear is moving through a space that gets smaller and smaller, until I’m crawling through a hole and eventually get stuck.

29

Lions and tigers are not specifically adapted to hunting/eating humans, but up until the last century or so we were absolutely a favored prey for them. Same with Nile crocodiles.

I’m not specifically terrified of any animal, but I am pretty urged-out by creatures that lay their eggs in other creatures… like tarantula wasps, or the African flys that have their maggots grow in your skin.

More generally I am mildly claustrophobic, so being buried alive is a terrifying concept to me… hearing the stories of the tornado survivors in that candle factory the other week was shiver-inducing to me.

30

I’ll admit it; clowns. And long before It was a thing. What compels people to layer on crazy makeup and make garish caricatures of themselves? It’s just… wrong.

31

Well, for me it’s the grey aliens with the big black eyes. If look out of my kitchen window and see a spider or a snake, or even a clown, I may be surprised or shocked. But if I see one of those suckers looking back at me, I die. Simply that. Heart failure. BOOM.

For a while in my youth I was a reader of Whitley Strieber and his books about his supposed alien encounters. Now I understand what it was, dude grifting. But for a while I was all aboard the crazy train. The description of what happens, like where he describes a shadow at his bedroom door. And then it rushes at him and he CAN SEE WHAT IT IS…

Pure terror for me.

So now I am old and don’t believe in this shit.

But what if is always in my head. And so I wake up at night and look through doorways and wonder, will this be the night? Will this be the night that my subconscious shows me this thing? Is this the night that I crap myself and die?

Sorry if TMI.

32

Trigger warning Rich: If you haven’t seen the movie Communion, then you may not want to watch this as it involves grey aliens with big black eyes:

When I first saw it, this scene legit scared the fuck outta me, and gave me nightmares for years. And the way Walken just sits there afterwards kinda freaks me out, too.

33

I have. It did.

34

I fear only one thing: that I will accidentally fuck myself in the ass, creating a infinitely regressive negative reality inversion that will simultaneously implode and explode space-time to an infinite degree.

35

Haha we are such opposites. If I saw that I’d run out, give them a hug, and beg them to take me with them back to their home planet lol.

36

I had heard recently that Tigers only attack humans if they are too old or sick to catch something better. Along with such factoids as “Great whites only bite humans when they confuse them for seals” it gave the impression large predators look at us like we’re old expired yogurt that they would rather not touch but still eat if there’s nothing else in the fridge. I’m happy to learn we are held in higher regard than that.

“accidentally”

37

Which has… NO FROGS! AAAAAHHHHHH!!!

38

War. Really any conflict internationally or nationally that I end up on the sidelines of. When in the military they trained us to be dispassionate, to do the thing we needed to do automatically because that is what it takes to win. Not thinking. But I think very much now. I see way too much dark stuff from conflicts as presented on the internet these days. People killed, people broken, life as they know it completely gone, even if they live. Maybe it was part of my time in the military or my previous love of war fiction and non-fiction or growing up in the CNN generation where conflict videos and embedded reporters are the norm.

That scares me. It’s why I intensely read about things like that going on sometimes, almost with a fervor. One part of me wants to know what that destruction is like while the other is in horror that is how it will end. Not peacefully with my wife by my side but from a bullet or bomb or injury or starvation with life torn from something that escalated to that point or where I can’t escape from it despite only passing through.

Even seeing people demonstrating with guns and frenzy against things that keep the peace tick that small part of my fear. Unlike my wife I’m not mesmerized and not willing to want to stay and see what’s going on, I want to get the fuck out of there.

39

When I’m alone in the house at night and I think about ghosts or serial killers, and I hear a creak from somewhere in the house, it scares me. That’s really the only thing that gets to me.

I do hate cockroaches. Heights are scary but that just means don’t go to the edge and look down. I can go up in the Sears Tower and not be afraid. Something about the idea of a maleovent ghost or serial killer when I’m alone is freaky.

40

Wow I completely forgot something similar. When it’s dark in the house and I’m alone and have to go upstairs for something I always get some strange horror movie flashback right before walking down the steps, like whatever evil is in the house will force push me and I go flying down the steps. I kung fu grip the handrail every time, just waiting on that one time the ghost tries to pull that move.

41

Yeah, same for me. I read/watched enough of the same stuff about aliens as a child that it has stuck with me. I’ve had enough nightmares about them too to cement in my brain that I’d simply be powerless compared to such advanced beings and that kind of inevitability of defeat in that kind of scenario terrifies me.