What’s Wrong With Me #2

I am afraid.

When I sat down to write this, I typed a few words and then I quit and looked at the screen for a long time.

It would be kind of funny if I said that I did quit writing because I was afraid, but it would be more true than funny.

When we made the decision to move to Germany for a year, some of the people I ran into in town made comments such that they wouldn’t have the guts to do what we were doing.

“You’re pretty brave,” they said over the produce.

“Not brave, just crazy,” I would say.

They would laugh, mostly to be polite, and I would smile and wave, push my cart over to the next aisle and wonder what the hell we were thinking, moving to Germany.

Because I am not brave.

And I am not the kind of person who shrugs and says what the hey kids, let’s pack up a suitcase each and move to Germany for a year.

I am the kind of person who doesn’t take that risk.

Or any risk.

I can’t.

It’s not about phobias, either.

I don’t have a phobia about heights or snakes or the number thirteen or anything stupid like that. Phobias are by definition irrational and I can’t stand irrational things.

My fears make sense.

For your viewing pleasure, I present to you a select few of these completely rational fears and I encourage you to share in them with me.

I am afraid to spend money.

When I have to spend money, (which I am forced to do because I’m not an idiot, and of course I have to eat and wear clothes and have the Internet), I feel horrible.

The horrible feeling is like a combination of guilt and worry and nausea with an overhanging cloud of dread. I can’t stop myself from thinking from feeling like the money I’m using at that moment comes from an intensely limited and finite source, and once it’s gone, I won’t have any more.

It’s crazy, because I have a job, and my employers appear to keep up with paying me every two weeks as long as I keep working, and presumably I do a good enough job that I won’t likely be fired, but I just can’t seem to allow myself to take it for granted.

This fear makes me look like some kind of cheap ass chiseler and frustrates the people around me.

It’s great that I don’t run up credit card debt because I never carry charges over to the next month and I never make those big, stupid, fun purchases that men make, like buying a 72 inch plasma TV or expensive hair plugs, but it means also that I literally can’t let myself buy anything without having some kind of internal crisis that invariably leaks out into the world around me.

No matter how much something costs, I will suddenly blurt out, “How much!?” in shock and shoot a look of wide eyed horror at the person I’m with.

The first seventy or eighty times, the people I am with deal with it just fine, but after a few years of knowing me and having to go to shops and restaurants, museums and theme parks with me, I guess this response becomes a problem.

Nobody wants to be constantly asked if we really need that. Or to be told that it would be a lot cheaper if we just made whatever we were looking at out of old pieces of wood and some bricks. Or to live with someone who grips the sides of his head and sobs out loud in the store when he has to buy new clothes.

And by Nobody, I mean my wife.

I am afraid of diseases.

Every year every media outlet drags out that same old platform to run in every conceivable news format, and I can’t stop myself from reading it all. Remember SARS? Bird flu? The inevitable, always forthcoming1918-style flu pandemic? How about Ebola? Any of those ring a bell? They sure do with me. I know way more about those diseases than anybody should know who isn’t holding a test tube, and I can’t seem to forget any of it.

In the summer, when I eat barbequed food I am tormented by ester chains and benzene linkages turning my steak carcinogenic, e.coli, salmonella and campylobacter in the burgers and chicken breasts, listeria in the cream cheese, cyclosporine in the strawberries, West Nile from the mosquitoes, Lyme Disease from the deer ticks and melanoma from the sun.

In the winter I am afraid of my kids getting sick or my wife getting sick or the people getting sick who touch things that my wife and kids are going to touch, so I tell them to wash their hands, and then I’m afraid that they’ll use antibacterial soap with triclosan in it and that will contribute to the mutation of ever more resistant bacteria. But even if they use normal soap I’m worried about how we are too clean now and we’re creating an environment for our children so free of bacteria that our kids are growing up without the exposure to germs that they need in order to form hardy immune systems.

Inevitably, somebody will tell me about their nephew who ate mud and cat litter and elk dung when he was a baby and never washes his hands and has NEVER had an antibiotic and then I think about how many times I have had to give antibiotics to my kids and I worry that I have wronged them. I have been overprotective and their immune systems haven’t developed to be strong enough and then I think about antibiotics in general and vancomycin resistant staph and necrotizing fasciitis and you actually get exposed to that stuff in the hospital when you are there trying to get cured from some other kind of illness and I have to stop because I could keep going on until your eyes began to bleed from the strain of reading it all.

I could list more fears.

Fears that are nothing but logical, obvious and unavoidable to me, but writing them all down would only make my chest tighter than it already always is, and it would stop being funny and start to make you worry about my sanity.

I don’t want to sit here in this basement and think about my fears anyway.

Instead, I will think about children in Iraq listening to IEDs go off in the streets outside their homes, and the slightly older children outside those same homes riding in HummVees wearing Kevlar vests and carrying M16s, or I will think about families huddled in basements listening to tornados tear their towns apart, think about mothers sitting beside their children in hospital beds, making silent bargains with any gods who might be listening and I will tell you that I know full well that that my fears are the most wonderful kind.

The world is full of people pressed up face to face against unimaginable terror, misery and suffering every single day, and yet I feel my heart race when I have to go to a party at somebody’s house.

My little fears are the ones that only a man with a privileged life can feel.

They’re luxuries, and in a way, I’m lucky to have them.