I slid head first tonight at hockey, towards the boards, entangled in some girl’s skate and stick, trying frantically to turn around before impact. I did manage to get my knee out in front of me, and subsequently hit the boards with that instead of my head. It really wasn’t much better, but I skated away from it, my mind replaying the incident over and over again with morbid invention.
I never actually envision myself walking away from accidents though. In fact, as time goes on, I find my obsession with horrible accidents growing to such a degree that I can’t stop thinking about them. I still participate in the same dangerous hobbies (and more), but now frightening thoughts fill my head much more often. Getting hit on the freeway, having a horse flip over on top of me, breaking my legs skiing, crashing my bike down a hill, being attacked by killer bees…the list goes on.
Strangely, despite these maniacal fears, I’m still thinking about getting my private pilot’s certificate. I’ve gone on an intro flight with A, who insisted to me recently that there was some kind of giant parachute on the expensive Cirruses that would save you if you were about to crash. Disbelieving, I made him Google it while at his house. We then both stared at several videos of small planes going into death spirals and otherwise falling out of the sky, and giant parachutes coming out of the tail and opening and saving all the passengers.
This $10,000 life saving device, I concluded, is what must make those Cirruses nearly $200/hour to rent. I found myself secretly wishing I wasn’t so poor that I had to fly ancient Cessnas that made weird noises through the window seals and that I could barely see out of because the seats were all saggy. But A and I did agree it made no sense to pay to fly the newer planes, when we could learn just as well in the older, cheaper ones. Until the engine dies and we die, I thought to myself. Where’s my big parachute? Stop. I knew I had to stop thinking about that, but how? Are we forever prisoners of our fears? Shackled by past experience?
Obviously I’d never been in a plane crash, so I can’t exactly say I have a fear of crashing planes because it happened to me before. It’s more like, I’ve had a few wrecks during my various “a little less safe than getting out of bed in the morning” activities, most of which I’ve walked away from, and now for some unexplicable reason the fear generated from those wrecks has swelled to encompass everything, including things that never happened and even things that don’t involve accidents.
My fear of not living up to at least a few people’s expectations has now, in my head, reached critical mass. The trouble is, none of these people really expect the ridiculous things from me that I imagine myself falling short of, yet I can’t shake the feeling that I am somehow not making the mark. In fact, some of these people don’t even know what to expect from me, as they just met me, yet my irrational fear of failure has led to a sort of performance anxiety with no basis other than my “perceptions of people’s perceptions.”
That I can write with such clarity about this insanity is also disturbing, but I don’t think I will even begin to discuss that topic. I’ve backdated my entry about the company party, because I just had to post this in case I get eaten by wild dogs in the next five minutes.
