Do you like scary movies?

I love scary movies, yet daily life causes me all manners of irrational fears. Why the seeming paradox? Some say that movies allow us to face our fears, even if in only a symbolic way, and work through them. I sometimes think I watch these things to see what kinds of mistakes the characters make so I can better prepare for my day ahead. I mean, doesn’t everyone’s car contain a flashlight, cell phone, jumper cables, garlic, silver bullet, and ax (for zombie head-chopping)? A girl never knows.

I wish I knew the source of my free-floating anxiety. Given enough free time, I can concoct the most elaborate of scenarios in which my cat Fez cause a Rube Goldberg-like chain of events that ends in his sister Lucy being impaled on a pair of scissors that I stupidly left out. Veggies don’t taste quite right? Must be rife with botulism - salmonella isn’t deadly enough; I have to jump to the big guns. I have never been seriously ill. I’ve never been in the hospital, other than a few trips the ER for stitches and broken bones. Is that why I’m so paranoid? Perhaps I think I am way overdue for some tragedy.

When I was in middle school, a girl I knew was abducted from her paper route one morning, raped, and dumped on the sidewalk. She recovered and was even able to testify in the court case (seems Einstein was wearing his work shirt that happened to have his name on it). Her name was never released, but I came from a fairly small town and word got around. There were of course some cruel things said, but I always felt bad that anyone would think less of her because of the horrific crime a stranger committed.

After we all graduated and went on about our adult lives, I lost track of her. But then I saw that she had posted contact information, including an internet link, on our high school alumni website. I visited the link, and saw that she is married, has 2 children, and looked great.

What does this have to do with fear? I wonder how her experience has shaped her. Has she grown into a woman that takes whatever is handed her because she knows first-hand that you can’t control everything in life? Or has she become scared for her children, watching their every move to and from school? I would suspect the former, and I find that utterly amazing. How someone who has lived through one of our worst fears, and she can accept the uncertainty of life.

I hope that I can convince myself to learn from that. I don’t want to have to go through the tragedy. I want to know that for all my worry and fretting and trying to control, that I can’t control it all and that’s okay. I think my heart already knows this, but I really, really want my head to learn it too.