Not the Sexy Kind of Fear

I think I contracted my irrational fear much like an STD. I must have picked it up sometime in college and, for the life of me, I don’t know who gave it to me. One moment I was a very “present” Birkenstocked 18-year-old, and the next thing I know I’m a 25-year-old with anxiety over a nest egg. I’ve always been precocious, but a mid-life crisis before the age of 30 strikes me as excessive.

It seems these days most pre-weds* have cultivated some sort of irrational fear.

* Pre-weds: shortening of Pre-Wedding; the 20 and 30-somethings who used to be “yuppies”—young professionals—though they may not be particularly “young,” and in this economy, many of them are no longer “professionals.”

“I’m afraid of corduroy,” deadpans a young man in square glasses.

“The smell of watermelon Lip Smackers makes me so nervous I vomit,” chimes another.

This type of “irrational fear” is not, in fact, irrational. It’s highly rational, because it’s a tool used by these young people to get laid.

Woody Allen neuroticism is back in a big way. Quirky anxiety, along with nerdiness and thrift, have become small, but valuable pieces of personality capital. People drop nuggets of personal oddity throughout a conversation, like a little trail of Xanax, to intrigue and lure others. The subtext is, “I’m cool, but accessible. . . . I’m smart, somewhere between savant and high functioning Asperger’s. . . . I’m funny, and that’s because my socially traumatic adolescence has made me a complex, but affably resilient person.”

This sort of measured hand-wringing zaniness is, in some circles, sexy.

This is not the kind of irrational fear I am talking about. I am talking about forehead-creasing fear. The kind of anxiety you wear. The kind of worry that bears down on you sleepless night after sleepless night. Forehead wrinkles, gray hairs, and bags under your eyes? Not sexy, just prematurely middle-aged.

If I am not having a panic attack about the texture of chenille, and if the scent of freshly peeled tangelos isn’t triggering a bout of nervous diarrhea, than what’s my less-than-quirky, less-than-sexy irrational-fear problem?

I’m a 65-year-old kvetching breadwinner, trapped in the body of a 25-year-old punk.

I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to pay for my kids to go to college. A reasonable concern if I had kids, which I don’t. I’m afraid my siblings won’t be able to pay for their kids to go to college. Do they have children? Thank god, no. When I didn’t have a job, I was afraid I’d never find one. Now that I have one, I’m afraid I’ll lose it.

I’ve got an emergency fund in case I get canned. I’ve got another emergency cash stash in case I need to buy farmland upstate and build a compound in order to protect my family from roving bands of unemployed, flesh-eating Wall Street bankers.

Should society not fall into an American Psycho meets The Road genre-crossing apocalyptic scenario, I may one day get a chance to crack into my “shoebox of last resort.” This is where I keep my “In Case I Have to Buy a Baby” moneys. The way some girls ferret away babysitting money and hostessing tips for their big-dream bus ticket out of town and subsequent plastic surgery, I’ve got a stark-reality, barren-womb, self-sufficient spinster fund.

Was I always this preoccupied by irrational fear? As a child I wasn’t so nervous. I was bossy, and big-boned, and insufferably chatty. But an anxious, Type-A 6-year-old with insomnia? Certainly not. Child-sized Jana possessed a very Zen lack of fear.

My first irrational fear, in memory, struck me when I was about 8-years-old and lasted just as long as it took me to register embarrassment. I was convinced that one of the teen heartthrob vampires from the 1987 movie The Lost Boys* was hiding under the stairs in my basement. Any time I was forced to descend into young Kiefer Sutherland’s lair for milk or toilet paper, I thought unspeakable bodily harm would befall me. Specifically, an 80’s-hair-band vampire would fall upon me, from his ceiling perch, and maul me about the face and neck. Today, I’m embarrassed by the not-so-subtle anxiety surrounding my unconscious feelings of young sexuality. One would think, as a result, I now suffer from a phobia of men with long, brushed out hair (which I do) and making out (which I don’t).

* Upon reviewing the trailer for The Lost Boys, I’m also embarrassed that I didn’t pick up on the fact that Kiefer Sutherland posed no real threat to me, because he was totally jonesing for Jason Patric the entire movie.

But my Kiefer Sutherland vampire fear was child’s play. As I sit here pulling out single strands of hair, which is what I do when I think hard about something that I can’t do anything about, I have to wonder if neuroticism is catching.*

* If so, I blame all you crazy, brainy Jews. You know who you are. If you’re already “chosen,” what are you so anxious about?

No matter what the answer, I don’t want premature worry to weigh upon me. Once again I wish to be young, reckless, and Birkenstocked. And when I do have kids, I want to be just short of utterly unconcerned with them, so that they rebel against me by being straight-laced overachievers. Obviously.

The Wife is good to remind me that, anxious or not, for as long as she’s known me, I’ve been a bit “older than my years.”

“As infants, some of us were 10 years in the making,” she points out. “You were already 10 years in the being.”

As The Wife is smarter, more anxious, and more Jewish than me, it takes me a moment to actually understand the wisdom-bomb she just dropped on me.

I love the idea of little-Italian-ovum Jana hanging out in my Mom’s ovary since the very beginning. For nearly a decade, gamete-me fretted about the future. Was I really mature and ready for ovulation? What if I end up alone and impenetrable? How would I cope with that sense of failure?

“I’m sitting this one out, you go right ahead of me,” I offered those other pin-headed ova, wringing my chromosomes with worry.

“No, no! Please, after you. Really, I insist,” I imagine urging the others, hustling those never-to-be-fertilized eggs down and out the fallopian tube.

Me, end up a cellular mass of unrealized potential? I’m sure I lost sleep over the issue long before I was even a twinkle in my mother’s eye.

Let’s be real, I still lose sleep over it.