Fear Itself

I get scared super easily.  I mean super duper easily.  When I was a kid (and by kid I definitely do not mean teenager) I slept with a night light because I got scared in the dark.  Then once my friends came over and for some reason I didn't have enough warning to hide my night light and they saw it and it was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life, but I tried really hard to play it off like "yeah, don't YOU have a night light?" and I think it almost worked.

Anyways, I definitely do NOT sleep with a night light anymore unless you count all the LED lights from various electronics in my room but I actually rarely even have those because the only electronic item I own these days is my laptop and I try to remember to unplug it because I am an environmentally good person and the environment is more important than my fear of the dark.  Which doesn't exist anymore.  Except that my fear has pretty much just transferred from being of evil spirits roaming around my bedroom to being of human night prowlers roaming around my bedroom.  Which is probably an improvement and if I was in therapy they would probably say that I have made excellent progress.

As a sign of my excellent progress, I check under my bed for a prowler pretty much every single night before I go to sleep, even nights where I have been in the house for hours and hours before going to bed.  My logical brain always says that if someone had broken into my house I probably would have noticed already and they probably would not have been able to move all the crap that's under my bed out of the way, hide it somewhere else, and then hide themselves under there without me hearing something.  Also, I'm pretty sure your average bandit doesn't have the patience to wait quietly under a bed for hours and would just go about their bandit-y activities immediately upon entering the home.

Unfortunately, no matter how much my logical brain tries to tell me these things in calm, dulcet tones, the rest of my brain gets really loud and screechy and shows me pictures of psycho killers with samurai swords under my bed waiting to stab me through my mattress, which is really counterproductive because it only makes the loud screechiness even worse.  (I'm pretty sure I saw that in a Quentin Tarintino movie which makes me hate him and hate myself for loving his movies and filling my subconscious with their colourful yet brutal imagery.)  No matter how hard I try to listen to the logic brain, soon my loud-and-screechy-with-colourful-yet-brutal-imagery brain wins and I check under my bed.

So basically what I'm trying to say is that I've replaced evil spirits with patient, clever, mastermind criminals who carry samurai swords.  So what I'm really saying is that I do not need to be medicated, thank you very much, and I do not like that jacket and do not want to wear it.  It clashes with my shoes.