This is Day 3 of the blog challenge. Today is all about my 8 fears (in no real particular order)…
8. Snakes. I hate them. They scare the crap out of me. We spent a couple of years in Georgia back when I was a kid and survival 101 in the Blue Ridge Mountains…know how to kill a snake. I’ve had way too many close calls with rattlesnakes and cottonmouth snakes to want anything to do with snakes again. When I was in high school, Kevin (god rest his soul) decided that he wanted to go into the Snake House at the Cincinnati zoo. It was Kevin…so I obliged, even though he knew I was scared to death of snakes. He thought…maybe it would cure my fear.
Remember that big ass snake in Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets? Well, I took one look at that gigantic snake and covered my mouth. Kevin came up to me and asked me if I was okay. He said I went completely white.
I freaked out and ran out of the Snake House and vomited in the trash can.
Kevin felt so bad about coercing me to go into the Snake House with him that we spent the rest of our zoo visit watching the White Siberian Tigers (my favorite).
7. Another terrorist attack. After watching the first tower on fire and then a second plane go right into the second tower…that is traumatizing enough. But when you’re sitting in a conference room in Tysons Corner, Virginia and then you get all psychic and say, “We need to stop focusing on New York. Washington’s about to be hit.” You know all hell’s about to really break loose (as in the panic button in my brain is about to go off).
What happened a few minutes later? We watched as a plane went into the Pentagon.
Then that fourth plane…we sat at our desks waiting…just waiting to find out if we were going to live or die in the next few minutes. Luckily, some brave human beings took over that plane and saved Washington, DC. For that, I can’t thank them enough.
After the fourth plane went down, the uncertainty of what would happen next as America was under attack, left us with nothing more than to evacuate after we watched the twin towers come down on television. Outside of our window, all we could see was the Pentagon on fire.
I lived in DC at the time. I couldn’t even get home. They had literally evacuated the city. I ended up staying with a co-worker (thank goodness I always left extra clothes at the office).
Since then, any thought of another terrorist act scares the hell out of me. I don’t ever want to be in another one for so long as I live. It really does strike terror in your soul.
6. Losing My Brother. Every time my brother goes off to war to serve our country, I always point out to him…you don’t have to do this. He always tells me that he knows, but his squadron would never let it down if he didn’t go.
Most people don’t have a choice when they go to war. For my brother, he does. He is the last in our bloodline. That means that the bloodline dies with him. Why is that his get out of jail card? Well, because we have royal blood flowing through our veins…and we’re the last.
While the military always assures us that he will be kept away from the frontlines and in the most obscure spot that the war would not even come close to him, I still hate it when he goes. Why? Because, I’ve always felt like it was just me and Charlie. If I were to lose him, I think I would honestly feel completely and utterly alone. I really would have nobody if I lost him.
5. Ghosts, Poltergeists, Spirits. I can handle slasher movies, demon movies, alien movies, and most horror flicks…but if the main premise deals with ghosts, poltergeists or spirits…I am scared shitless. Why? Because I believe in the afterlife. I know that there are spirits that try to take over your body while you’re sleeping. Want to know why the tradition of veiled women happened back in the olden days and still continues through to this day in Muslim societies? Because way back when, spirits were known to steal beautiful women, impregnate them with their seed, and then you’ve got the monsters of the old days (giants and such). They believed it so much that they tried to hide a woman’s face so that spirits wouldn’t try to impregnate their women.
No joke. That’s why they started wearing veils way back when.
4. Having No Money. This is a huge fear of mine. Granted, I’ve lived in that situation before for a very long time. I really don’t have to fear it anymore because I’ve made sure to protect myself in every single scenario that could possibly come up.
But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that if you have the mindset to go out there and make money, even when you go completely broke, you know what to do to get your life back on track, making the same kind of money like you used to make. In other words, if Donald Trump can be poorer than a bum on the street one day, and then rich again shortly after that, then by golly, I can do that too.
3. “THE” Dream Doesn’t Come True. Girls know what I’m talking about. We all have that dream that we’ll meet “The One” and marry him, make lots of babies, and have a happily ever after story to tell our grandchildren one day on how grandma and grandpa met and fell in love and lived happily married for 50+ years.
This fear is something I think about several times a day…what if that guy that I dreamt about when I was 15…then crossed paths with when I was 25…and then knew WHO he was when I was 29…decided that he didn’t want me? What’s even worse…what if he decided he wanted to be with somebody else? What if I was wrong? Maybe I should settle?
Dr. James Dobson said a long time ago, “If God gives you a vision, it’s meant to come true.”
Back when I was 15, I had a dream of the man I was meant to spend the rest of my life with. I saw his profession, all the way down to the company he would work for. I saw the circumstances where he would leave for 3 years, but then he would come back. I knew in my emotional state I would be mad as hell at him for leaving. Actually, it would break my heart that he would leave. I would then doubt that he was “The One” completely. But he would come back and then it would work out.
At 25, the first time our paths crossed, I heard an angel say to me, “Tonight, you will see your future husband. You won’t know it is him. He will walk right past you and you won’t even know it’s him. But four years from now, your paths will cross again. When they say his name, you will know it is him.”
Crazy little thing to hear, right? Four years later, our paths did cross again. The details from the dream from when I was 15 played into this as I knew his profession. I was sitting there, feeling like an electrical force was pulsing through my spine, and it felt like the angels were excited, happy and singing…and then that’s when I heard his name, and I knew it was him. It was exactly four years later.
He left for three years, just like the dream said he would do (when I was 15)…and he came back. Now, we’re at the rest of the story…right now, it still has me at the “MAD AS HELL” part, and being a little broken hearted thinking that he just wasn’t meant to be. It was just a dream, that’s all.
The question would be…why would God show me some random man’s future when I was 15 years old if that man wasn’t meant to be in my life? Why would an angel prophesy EXACTLY how our paths would cross…BOTH TIMES?
All of the details have fallen into place, but I keep looking at the current details thinking…how can God expect me to have faith in something he’s created for me…when I see that there’s someone else in his picture? How am I not supposed to doubt it all?
The issue here with this dream…it’s hard to believe it’s meant to come true, even when you see each and every piece fall into place just like in the dream. Really, this is the dream that scares me to death. I’m afraid to believe in something so unbelievable for fear that it was just a dream and nothing more.
I’m afraid that it will do nothing more than make me feel like I wasted these last 20 years believing in God…that I wasted it on that feeling that there really was someone out there better for me…when I could have just married someone else 10 years ago.
2. No Food. I think this fear stems from my childhood. I always felt like I was starving. Granted, it felt better when I actually starved myself on purpose. These days, that fear comes when I travel. I am so limited in the things that I can eat that it’s hard to find the foods that I can eat. I mean…I can’t live on salad three times a day. There’s not enough calories in it. Besides, I prefer piping hot food to feel comforted.
I also am so picky about my coffee. Coffee is my backup plan when I’m traveling. I can live on coffee (it’s piping hot and the stomach is comforted), but I can’t if it tastes horrible or I can’t figure out how to say coffee in a foreign language….then I’m screwed (imagine when I arrived in Prague and had no clue how to say coffee and the girl had no idea what I was talking about…I almost cried…thank God the NHL had coffee at O2 Arena…I spent so much time standing next to the coffee).
I never know how my stomach is going to react when I go someplace. If it’s hot outside, then it swells up and I can’t eat. Or if a country bases most of its food on carbs, then I’m really screwed. I need protein and vegetables with little to no ‘bad carbs.’
Trust me, it takes an hour for me to eat one meal. I freak out if there’s not enough water on the table. Food, altogether, is my biggest fear…fear to not have it and fear that I can’t eat it.
It’s an ongoing battle every single day. In NYC, it’s not so bad, because my office’s cafe has a menu based on clean eating. If I don’t eat there, I can go to Fresh and Co. which is also another clean eating establishment (clean=no additives of the bad kind, or pesticides, hormones, etc.). I know where to pick up organic foods in the city and take them home. When I travel…I really spend most of the time going from one grocery store to the next looking for something edible that I can eat…and I rarely, if ever, eat in public because of my fears that I won’t be able to eat the food (i.e. I’ll vomit). Seriously…food is a huge fear of mine.
1. Watching a hockey player get injured. It all started that one fateful day during my first playoffs when I said, “Hmm…I wonder why Jaromir Jagr hasn’t left the game yet. I thought he would have left the game by now.” Not three seconds later he throws a punch into left field and dislocates his arm. His arm just dangled there (I was so freaked out). Since then, I have a superstition that if I say a player’s name during the playoffs…that player will be injured.
I’ve seen Marty Brodeur and Kevin Weekes get injured (freaked me out). There are the ones that get hit so hard they can’t even move or get back up from the ice. Trust me…that stuff scares the crap out of me…no matter who’s getting hurt out there.
