25 Things Of Which I Am Afraid

See also my subsequent list, "25 Things That Make Me Feel Brave".


Bonus extra fear: what's under every manhole cover I step on.

1. I am afraid that we are just as smart as we think we are.
2. I am afraid that, when I finally do go to a dentist, they are going to have to do something, anything, to my teeth and/or gums.
3. I am afraid that I will die by freak electrocution if I bathe during a rainstorm.
4. I am afraid that I will have to spend my elder years living in a tent without electricity because we killed the earth.
5. I am afraid that something might be in my closet when the door is closed, but I feel insecure, as though I need to batten down the hatches, when the door is open.
6. I am afraid that I might be the only one who loves this hard.
7. I am afraid that, when I give blood, the little finger-pricker thing will be missing its spring and will stab me in the bone again like that one time in 1995.
8. I am afraid that I might not have my words when I need them.
9. I am afraid that there might really be ghosts in my apartment, and I just can't see them.
10. I am afraid that the Palinode will die before we have a chance to get very old together.
11. I am afraid that I will die before the Palinode and I have a chance to get very old together.
12. I am afraid that I will run out of my allotment of near death experiences.
13. I am afraid that I will get cancer again, because I had it too easy the first time.
14. I am afraid that, because my apartment building is old, I could fall through the floor into the basement at any moment.
15. I am afraid that I will never have a really restful, comfortable sleep again in my life.
16. I am afraid that I will never be great.
17. I am afraid that I will die in a plane crash.
18. I am afraid that I will become one of those old people who ends up forgotten and eating cat food until someone finds her body months later because I had no children.
19. I am afraid that someone will shut down the internet.
20. I am afraid that I will somehow end up unconscious in the hospital, and someone will decide to give me penicillin, and I will die before ever regaining consciousness.
21. I am afraid that I will never write books.
22. I am afraid that, if I do write books, they will be terrible, and I will look back on them years later with shame.
23. I am afraid that my adult acne will never go away, and I will be the only eighty-year-old still using zit cream.
24. I am afraid that I might be dysfunctional for not feeling sad about the inevitable lessening of the mass production of paper books.
25. I am afraid that, because my concern about my recent addiction to Thirtysomething on Netflix outweighs my nostalgic fear about the state of books, I am much more dysfunctional than I fear.