It's Halloween. I see blood, fake or real, and it doesn't bother me. I see spiders, snakes, goblins, witches, clowns, zombies, you name it, and I am straight-faced and nonreactive to each and every spirit of the night. I'm a horror movie buff and I absolutely love gore. Nothing conventionally frightening has ever really seemed to get to me.
There are however, three oddly specific,dreadfully nontraditional, and idiosyncratic fears that I have. I'm going to write about all of them because while each one triggers the same rigorous fear response, there are three very separate places that the fear derives from and each relates to a different one of the five senses.
1. Number one is not a body, but something that a body does relating to sense of smell. This is by far my greatest fear, and people around me commit this act frequently because in any rational psyche this action would certainly not induce fear. I don't even want to say what it is because it gets me so worked up, but here goes....
Hand sniffing.
Oh. My. God.
I might get sick from just talking about it. I couldn't put a picture of it above because if I google image hand sniffing, you will not be seeing me in class ever again on account of heart failure and brain combustion.
I freak out when people sniff their hands, and I mean freak out. I have run screaming from rooms and when I was younger it used to make bile rise in my throat but I have gotten better at my reaction, however it does make me completely nauseas and anxious. I have tried to get to the bottom of why it makes me so scared for a long time, but I haven't ever been able to fully figure it out. It makes me anxious, sick, frozen, disgusted, and terrified.
I'd rather have
Jason Voorhees chasing me at lightning fast speed with a rusty machete sticky with the blood of all of the other teenaged girls he had just slaughtered than have him chasing me at lightning speed with his hands cupped over his nose and sniffing.
People have asked in the past if it has to do with cleanliness and I think that part of it does, but it doesn't seem to be that simple. The fear of people with dirty hands (hence why Jason was a perfect example, because his are probably absolutely filthy) smelling their hands makes my fear multiply rapidly, but it still bothers me when people smell their freshly lathered antibacterial soaped up hands.
I have always been slightly odd about scents. I have come to realize that I have a heightened sense of smell and make a lot of connections and correlations based off of aroma. In particular, I have a hyperawareness of the smell of bodily emanations and it sounds extremely strange, but I can smell things on people. I can smell if someone had been drinking the night before even if it's not flowing off of them. I can smell if someone hasn't taken a shower, I can smell all of the different perfumes, body washes, shampoos, lotions that someone is wearing, etc. I mean, I'm not hound dog, but I am more conscious of smell than most people I'm surrounded by. If you ask me to describe the scent of something, you'll get an answer that is very complex. For instance, if you ask me what the classroom we normally have Bodies class in smells like, my answer would be vacuum bags, new balance sneakers with minimal wear, the antibacterial lemon-scented lysol that comes in a spray can, rubber, jacket pockets, and vienna sausages.
So I'm weird about smells. And I mean sure, hands are covered in gross, gross things. We use them all day long for basic functioning and communication. At any given moment, there are all kinds of disgusting germy creatures living in the cracks of your hands. It's repulsive to me to want to smell everything those hands may have touched throughout the day even if we are, by nature, not repelled by the fetid scents our own bodies produce. Hands are also kind of scary to me because they're like little people. When you take away someones hands you remove mass amounts of function. I would call my hands my most important body part, aside from my brain. I used to have such a strong fear that someone someday was going to chop off my right hand (my dominant hand) and then I would only have my left hand and of all the things I wouldn't want to have to learn how to do once I lost my hand, writing would be number one. So, I taught myself to write with my left hand just in case and am now ambidextrous. Let's pray that I get to keep both of my hands though.
So, there's something about hands, aromas, and germs that pool together to make me so fearful of this innocent act. Someday I'll get to the bottom of it, but for now I just have to pray continuously that I don't catch someone in the act.
And to all you hand sniffers out there, you're sick.
2. This next one is also not a body and relates to my sense of sound. Remember back in grade school when it was cool to have velcro sneakers and everyone begged their parents to buy them a pair? Well, that period of time was one hellish nightmare for this girl. Not only do I hate the sound of velcro to the degree that most would associate with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, but it actually scares me shitless. I can handle velcro in small doses depending on the amount of wear to the nylon strips, but extended velcro sounds make me tense up and panic. It's not even so much that the sound is so horrendous, it's more so that it makes me feel, well, like I am covered in syrup. It also makes me feel like I cannot move. So basically the sound of velcro makes me feel frozen and sticky. Oddly specific reaction? Yes. Why this reaction? Once again, not a clue. It very well may be that I detest the sound so much that the only way my body can react is in fear. All I know is that it makes me want to curl up in a ball in a dark closet and pray that the echo of the velcro monster doesn't find me in there. I am also realizing just now as I wrote that last sentence that I have a huge fear of being covered head to toe in syrup.
Although I survived the velcro shoe phase, I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to completely stay away from this:
If velcro shoes weren't excessive enough, they had to go and invent a velcro wall that people wear full body velcro suits to jump onto.
Ugh.
3. Okay, the last one is an actual body. My initial fear response related to my sense of sight, but quickly escalated into much more.
Here goes:
Condoleezza Rice.
I know what you're thinking: how incredibly rude of me. After all, she was the first female african-american secretary of state but I promise I have my reasons.
I am the youngest child in my family and the only female. I have two older brothers, one of which
really, and I mean
really, liked to screw with me. He's almost five years older, so picking on his innocent adolescent baby sister became his favorite pastime.
Mind you that I was a very innocent, honest, and virtuous little girl that was sweet as pie and believed every outlandish lie that my brother fed me for a long long time.
I was roughly 10 years old. My brothers bedroom was right across the hall from mine. This had never posed itself as a problem, until one night while I was sleeping my door pushed open and it woke me up. I popped open my eyes in time to see the outline of my eldest brother's figure before he killed the power to my night light. He had made sure to shut off every single light in the house so it was pitch black and I did NOT like that. I hated the dark and I hated not being able to see. I jolted up in my bed and pulled my comforter up above my nose. I knew he was in my room but I didn't know what he was doing. He suffers from severe epilepsy and I thought at first that he was about to start having a seizure because he wasn't saying anything and he was behaving oddly. Just as I went to go screaming and panicking down the hall to my moms room, he said "Don't freak out. I'm here to help you. There's someone after you. I'm going to tell you how to handle her but I promised her that I'd keep the lights off."
I was so confused at this point. My eyes were bulging, but I could make out his form better now that the lights had been off for a few minutes. He sat down on the end of my bed and he said "We don't have time for questions, so you need to listen to my every word Katherine. You will not have the opportunity to ask me anything because I will need to disappear for my own safety as soon as I finish telling you what is about to happen."
As you can imagine, I'm freaking out at this point.
So what he said went something like this:
"Condoleezza Rice came into my room a few minutes ago, and she said she wanted my soul. But, I told her it was too black and that she wasn't going to be able to use it. Condoleezza was not happy about this, but I told her that you were indeed very innocent and that she could take your soul. She gave me thirty minutes to come and warn you of her arrival in your bedroom and so I could say my final goodbyes to you. You're such a good sister giving up your soul for me and being so calm about waiting for your impending doom. It was nice knowing you. I'll be sure to take good care of Ivan (our dog) for you. Oh, mom and sean (my other brother) said goodbye too. Okay. Times up. I need to get going. Bye Katherine."
He then proceeded to take both of the lamps out of my room and barricade my door shut so I had no available light.
Yes, I woke up in the morning and I still had my soul (or at least I think did), but I completely believed him. I was freaking out all night long waiting for Condoleezza Rice to show up in my room and kill me. I was mortified for weeks. He kept telling me that she was delaying her trip for a number of reasons but that she would be there when I least expected it because I had somehow pissed her off.
He ran with it for months, and he would print out pictures of her and tack them all around my room and would just put more up if I took them down. It took me way too long to realize that Condi was not coming for me. The story was not real, but the fear sure was.
Brothers.
Either way, her face scares the pants off of me not only because of the memories it triggers, but she is actually kind of scary looking. She is a very powerful and intimidating woman. She has beady shark eyes and a constant aggressive look on her face. She is certainly not someone I want sneaking into my room and stealing my soul, that's for sure.
