Driving with Fear

I know I’ve already written about this once before, but as I don’t really have any more job-related stories for the time being, I’m going to dive back into fear again.

Last night, I drove home from my friend Heather’s house with only a vague idea of where I was going.  This was only the second time I have ever driven in this direction from her house, since the approximately one million other times, I was driving toward my parents’ house.  This time I was equipped with a broken GPS, no paper directions, little light, and uncertain thoughts of “Have I seen this before?  Was I supposed to go the other way?  Is this another name for 138…” and so on.  Michael was on the phone, but he didn’t exactly have a satellite image of where I was, and his phone died mid-sentence anyway.

After Michael’s phone rudely cut us off, I called back a few (three) times to make sure it wasn’t just a momentary lapse of signal on one of our ends.  Three straight-to-voicemail calls later, I counted his phone as dead and assessed my situation.

I was alone.  I was very probably lost.  It was dark.  I had no GPS and no desire to stop and ask for directions.  The only sound was my iPod playing the first three seconds of songs I’ve grown tired of and immediately skipped.

As I drove, I became increasingly more aware of the reflective properties of my windows.  I tried my hardest not to look too long in either direction, because I remembered that moment in The Grudge when the woman looks out the car (train?) window and sees the reflection of the stringy-haired ghost spirit thing.  Six years later and that image is still burned into my memory, always smoldering like an unattended fire, waiting for the right moment when I fan the flames again.  It always happens unintentionally, but when it does, it is so hard to shake. 

I drove on, forcing my eyes to look ahead of me only, foot pressing harder and harder on the gas and praying there were no cops around.  “Sorry officer, I was speeding because I was afraid of that thing from The Grudge” would probably not get me a warning.  If anything, it would get me dragged out of the car and forced to walk a straight line, something I can’t do very well sober.  I decided that, if questioned, I would lie and say something was chasing me.  “I saw someone come out of the bushes and run after my car.”  Yes, that would work.  How could they prove nothing was there?  “Why didn’t I check to see if I’d lost it yet? Well, uhh… I was really concentrating more on escaping the thing that was chasing me than making sure it wasn’t still chasing me.”  Maybe that would work.  But then there was the question of why would I, a rational human being, would think someone would be capable of chasing a car traveling 60+ miles per hour?  To that I had no answer.  My foot pressed harder on the gas, and I turned up the iPod.

Rufus Wainwright’s version of “Hallelujah” (you’ll remember it from the first Shrek movie) started.  I tried to sing along, furrowed my brow like I do when I sing passionately to Journey songs.  The logic was that if I pretended to be singing passionately, maybe I could let the music and my own private concert distract me from the feeling that my windows were creeping closer and closer.  Eventually I would have to look at them; they were closing in, forcing me to face that terrifying creature, her blue-tinted skin and red eyes slightly covered by her stringy, matted hair.  I took a deep, shaky breath.  “I know this room, I’ve walked this floor…”  What room?  What floor?  What I had once imagined as an opulent, glittering marble floor with a grand staircase extending from it had now transformed into an abandoned house, creaky staircase, and dirty blood-stained floor.  Don’t look at the windows.  Just keep driving. 

“She tied you to the kitchen chair.  She broke your throne and she cut your hair.”  Then she cut off your head and it rolled across the floor, leaving a trail of blood behind it.  The expression you had right before being decapitated would stay on your face forever, frozen as if someone had hit the pause button right before she sliced you.  Just keep driving.  Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look.  Eyes on the road.  Straight ahead.

I resented that I was twisting what I have always thought to be such a beautiful song.  The more I thought about the evil ghost that was almost definitely staring in at me from outside the window, the faster my heart pounded against my ribcage.  I could hear it beating, feel it pumping my blood, feel my adrenaline rising.  Which reminded me of senior year, and made the terrifying drive into the darkness with the evil spirit outside the window even more horrible.

Senior year, I went through a pretty tremendously bad breakup.  It wouldn’t be the last time I went through almost this exact same breakup, but eighteen-year-old me didn’t know that at the time.  Eighteen-year-old me did a lot of late-night writing of bad poetry and crying pointless tears into the pages of the cutest baby blue journal adorned with cartoon animals.  This was a scene that replayed almost nightly for a really long time, this sad, heartbroken girl sitting up on the top bunk of her bed at 1:00AM, ignoring the clock blinking, flashing “GO TO BED” in neon green imaginary letters.  Eighteen-year-old me couldn’t go to sleep, because eighteen-year-old me kept herself awake until the fatigue was strong enough to drag her down on the spot and force into near-comatose slumber.  Lying awake made me think, analyze, pick apart every conversation, every glance, every movement – and look for an answer.  There was no answer, and that made me anxious.  Coupled with the exhaustion, both physical and mental, somehow that anxiety turned into what I perceived to be nausea.  Since about the age of six, I have had this ridiculous, unexplainable, nearly life-controlling fear of throwing up.  And what happens when your anxiety turns into nausea?  Your adrenaline kicks in, augmenting the feeling to a degree you really aren’t prepared to deal with.  And so it went, nearly every night the second half of senior year, eighteen-year-old me stayed up until 2:00 or 3:00, trying to find a distraction that would get rid of the terrible feeling of fear rising in her throat.  For the record, those nights always ended in me drifting off at some point, sleeping a good three or so hours, and that stupid godforsaken alarm jolting me rudely awake.  But it still happens sometimes that when I get afraid, I get nauseous.  Then I get more afraid.  And so on.

And so, with the ghost outside and the dark, reflective windows caving in on me, whispering “Look at me,” in the same way that clown from IT did in the dream I had at age eight, after seeing it for the first (and let’s hope only) time – the nagging nauseous feeling that I so often associate with fear and anxiety kicked in.  “This is stupid,” I said to myself.  “I’m not sick.  I haven’t been sick.  There is no reason to feel this way.”  And my brain searched for a distraction.  I waited for the song to be over, hoping a more jam-worthy song would take its place.  My foot pressed on, and I tried to keep my speed around 60, but with my heart pounding in my ears and the windows daring me to look at them, all I could really concentrate on was getting home.  Now.  Faster.

After what felt like hours, but was more realistically only a few minutes, I started to see familiar landscapes.  I took turns I make on a regular basis and knew that soon I’d be passing the Burma Shave signs with their cutesy sayings.  I breathed a little easier, relaxed my deathgrip on the steering wheel.  The lights from the town penetrated my windows and made them considerably less reflective.  The sick feeling that had come out of nowhere subsided.  The whole ordeal felt like a summer storm – the kind that comes quickly, last a few minutes, then blow away leaving everything a little wetter and shinier than before.  I’d survived the imagined terrors, and finally I was home.

Fear is a strange thing.  I’m afraid of a lot more things than I probably shouldn’t be: the dark, that thing from The Grudge, the clown from IT, serial killers, attics, basements, dying, loved ones dying, having kids because so much can go wrong with babies, throwing up, looking stupid, not getting a job, not getting my contract renewed after I finally do get a job, people lying to me, not knowing something everyone else knows, chairs that are facing me at night, other drivers on the road, this tick bite giving me lyme disease, cockroaches, not being liked, rejection, failure, strangers at night, and gaining a lot of weight, to name just a few. But not heights.  I freaking love heights.

I’m not sure what to do about these fears.  I know some of them are normal things that regular people are afraid of, but some of them kind of seem like I just pointed at a book of things and said, “That.  I’m going to be afraid of that.” 

Michael and I like to play this game with Ferris called “Make Ferris Uncomfortable.”  Our cat spends most of his life teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, so when he’s lying down comfortably we like to remind him that his world could change at any minute.  We pick up random ordinary things and simply place them near him.  He immediately gets on edge, sniffs the intruding object, bristles at the tail, and sometimes leaves before we have a chance to put another thing next to him.  Okay, we’ve only actually done this twice.  And I guess it’s probably a little cruel of us.  But Ferris and I are alike in that we both spend most of our time worrying about something.  And I guess If I lived in a house with giants I would get pretty uncomfortable if they started boxing me in with their random crap too.  If I did live in a house with giants of another species, my list of fears would be amended to add things like: being stepped on, those giant jerks not feeding me, being pushed outside into the vast unknown, being put in a box and forgotten about, being eaten, and finally, those giant jerks putting their random crap next to me for no reason.