As shown in my post in the drunk thread I hate bugs, as in scared shitless. I can deal with snakes, spiders, rats, etc, but when it comes to the demon spawn known as insects, I turn into a little girl. Focus: What are you afraid of?
Being in water in the dark. Swimming pool with other people at night? Fine, but open water, even in a game, scares the shit out of me. This may or may not be related to my grandfather dunking me in a pool and holding me under just a little too long...when I was 5. Given the fact that I nearly drowned at the same age (my parents were idiots) I'm lucky I can set foot in a pool at all. Also, Amazon forest pubes (thanks dixie!).
We may walk fast, but since we have legs that are half the size of your gigantic white people's legs, we have to take twice as many steps to get half as far. It's a miserable circle. I have an irrational fear of drive-by shootings. No joke. Drive-bys, drowning, spiders, vermin and the dark. In that order.
The last time I was in LA my friend told me the hot new trend for gangbangers was highway shootings. Where rival gangs pulled up to the targets car and blasted the driver with a shotgun, at full speed. He pointed out a few places where there were crashes he thought were probably hits. So you're not safe in your car either.... I just hate spiders and insects.
Bugs get me every time. That and dying alone and unmourned, because I never really grew out of the teen angst phase.
Drowning. I almost drowned 4 times, had to be revived three. I CAN swim. I start swimming fine, solid form, then next thing I know I wake up on the side of the pool with a lifeguard. No mas. I have a problem crossing any man-made construction that looks rusty or old. Ladders, stairs, bridges, any significant height off the ground or above water scares the fuck out of me. I've learned to handle it, but walking across a bridge and it starts to bounce, I'm bolting.
A shirttail relative of ours has a teenaged son that one day vanished. No note, no warning, no notice. There for breakfast in the morning and not there for dinner. The story does have a happy ending. He ran away and the PI they hired found him 4 months later living in some weird halfway house/commune in San Francisco. The thought keeps me up at night. Every once in a rare while I'll wake up in cold sweats and go upstairs and check to make sure all three of them are still there. My hands are shaking writing this. What if, one day, one of them was just....gone.
Definitely sharks, or anything else in the ocean that I can't see swimming underneath me. I don't care what anyone says about how rare attacks are, you are not the top of the food chain out there. I miss lakes where the most you have to worry about is leeches. I still go in the ocean, but when I'm in deep water I'm constantly nervous.
I can stand on the flashing edge on the roof of a 70 story buiiding and my palms won't sweat, but the minute a wasp or hornet is within a twenty foot radius of me I flee in terror. Since I have had memories, I cannot remember a time when I was not scared of them completely. When people violently swat at them near me I just want to punch them in the face. Useless creatures. Why do they even exist? Not even Greenpeace would protect them.
Even worse is the fact that they fly silently so you don't even know it's there until it's landed on you and moments away from plunging its devil stinger into your sweet, tender flesh. Hate those fuckers.
Goddamn it, the League Against Stereotypes is gonna be super mad at this thread, but drowning also. I very nearly drowned once, to the extent that I wound up in the hospital for two weeks.
The police. The police make me temporarily forget that I'm white. I am a law-abiding, wholesome-looking, well-spoken, upper-middle-class and Caucasian. I have never been arrested. Never even been questioned or stopped by a police officer outside of routine traffic stuff (i.e. 10 mph over the speed limit). No one in my family has been arrested. There is no good reason for this fear. But holy shit I am a scared that one day, they will put me in pound-me-in-the-ass penitentiary. When i see a policeman, I tense up and start racking my brain for what I might have done recently. Hell, sometimes I start inventing things that I haven't done but they might think I did. Or start wondering if I have in fact done something, and merely forgot about it. "Have I murdered anyone recently? Well, I don't think so...that I know of..."
I am afraid of spiders, giant cockroaches, women larger than myself, and failure. That is in no particular order by the way.
I have a weird thing with heights. I'm not sure that I'm afraid of heights, but I'm definitely afraid of falling from heights. It's like if I think in my mind that something isn't well constructed I'm most likely going to step through a weak spot and plummet to my death. I can't put a tall ladder up against a house and climb up it onto the roof because I'm very afraid it's going to fall. However, at work I can climb up ladders on large pieces of equipment or our liquid storage towers, much higher than a roof, that I know are made of quality steel and are securely attached and there is a safety loop going around the ladder. I can go way up in the air in a large man lift, but the smaller electric ones I only get a few feet up and I freak out. In one of our buildings we have a conveyor that runs along the roof trusses that honestly I'm not sure is safe for anyone but people still go on it, I can't. I can walk along a bridge walkway high over water or walk out way out on our mobile conveyors[50+ ft from the ground] and I'm fine. I also hate spiders and any other creepy crawlies that have more than 4 legs.
When it comes to cops, the only difference between race is that if you're white, the cops might act like complete assholes and totally fuck up your shit for no reason. If you're a minority, they definitely will.
"I'm sorry officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that." (That was a good one, right? Because I did know I couldn't do that!)