Everyone is scared of something, even if they do not admit it to very many people. There is always something that can scare the pants off of someone without a moment's notice. For some, it is an fear of something that is tangible and visible. Very common fears are clowns, spiders, and tight spaces, but some unseen horrors are what keep others up at night. I for one have a fear of loneliness. I know, it sounds strange if anyone reading this knows me really well, but it makes sense to them to. I am the type of person that likes to be alone, a lot. Probably more than anything. But I am sitting here writing about having a fear of loneliness. "How does this happen?" you may be asking yourself that question right now, and trust me I have been asking it for years. Or you could be thinking, "Damn, this girl is crazy." and you would also be one thousand percent correct on that statement as well.
Let me try to articulate what this fear actually feels like to the readers that have no idea what I am talking about. Imagine that you are sitting in a room all by yourself. You have a little inkling of intuition that someone is close enough around you that they will hear you if you yell for them. So you yell, and yell. Then you have this horrible realization that people can hear you but do not want be around you. They are making the choice not to be with you. You are alone. You are alone because of something that you have done that is undesirable to the other people that are around you.
Now how horrible does that sound? Pretty bad, right? It is completely and totally irrational because I know for a fact that all I have to do is pick up the phone and I have at least four people, if not more, that I could call. But if you think about it, all fears are irrational. Not one has ever made sense to anyone else unless they also have the same fear that you do.
I feel like sometimes my mother gets annoyed with me because I will call her in the middle of the day, while she is at work, and she thinks something is wrong. I just tell her that I'm lonely, and by now she is used to it, so we will talk for about 10 minutes about the same things we talked about hours ago when I called her the first time. Even when I was a little girl, I would wake up in the middle of the night and walk into my parents' room to climb into bed with them. My mom would ask me if I had had a nightmare, and I would tell her I just got lonely in my bed all by myself.
There is a fear for absolutely everything. Look up a list of phobias, and you will be able to find some of the most ridiculous fears that some people have. But be careful because the reason that they are on that list is because they are real fears that real people are struggling with. They may even be struggling with this fear of loneliness, so the next time you are considering hanging out with someone that you haven't heard from in a while, do it. They might be sitting by their phone waiting for that text.
