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Tsunami

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Clarissa

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I’m obsessively, terribly scared of tsunamis. Which is quite funny given that I live deep inland. I should be terrified of tornadoes because I live in tornado-land. And I do fear them but not in an overwhelming, crazy way like tsunamis. I never lived anywhere that has tsunamis, so it’s not a fear based on experience. Psychologically, it’s my fear of being swept away and overwhelmed by a personality much stronger than mine.

And by the way, I feel nauseous with fear even writing this post.

What’s the natural disaster (if any) that terrifies you more than any other? I promise not to offer any psychological explanations because I only have my own and I paid a lot of money for it.

9 responses to “Tsunami”

  1. bluebird of bitterness Avatar
    bluebird of bitterness

    It tends to be things I’ve had experience with — in my case floods and wind storms. I’ve lived through two floods that did a huge amount of damage, and we had a wind storm forty-something years ago that ripped trees up by the roots and knocked our power out for four days. I had a baby in diapers at the time and was recovering from surgery, and it was hotter than Hades, so not a good time to be without electricity (not that there’s ever a good time).

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  2. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “wept away and overwhelmed by a personality much stronger than mine”

    That does not sound like an immediate danger….

    Anyway, when I lived in Florida I was far more worreid about tornadoes (there are a lot where I’m from, mostly smallish but a lot) than hurricanes. With hurricanes you usually have days of warnings so you can do something. Tornadoes come out of nowhere… so that’s what scares me, unpredictable things that you can’t prepare for or defend yourself against….

    Also the idea of being bombed (for similar reasons)…. rationally I know that in a NATO country I’m not in much of anything like immediate danger but…. yeah planes sound different now.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      You haven’t met my mother, clearly. 🙂 She’s the real tsunami in my life.

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  3. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    Like Cliff– grew up with hurricanes so they don’t bother me. You get like 2-3 days to ponder the weather maps, check your elevation for the fortieth time, and decide whether to evacuate or not. It’s sometimes a really big deal and destroys your house, but you don’t have to be there when it happens.

    Tornadoes… I’ve never really lived in a big tornado zone. I’m nervous about earthquakes, but again, eh. I’ve experienced a few, nothing major, and it’s incredibly weird but not really something that keeps me up at night.

    Flooding gets me, though. Any time I have thought about moving somewhere in the mountains, or out west… I think of flooding and shudder. Here, it’s flat and coastal, so even though it’s not that unusual to get four inches of rain in just a few hours… it runs right off into the sea. We average something like 80+ inches of rain a year, most of it in short torrential downpours, and the only time we have water over a road is when the storm drains get clogged.

    But up in the hills… whole different story. We’ve had more than one hurricane that killed way more people in Appalachia than on the coast, due to the intense rain. That wigs me out– the idea that all that water could just go downhill and pile up. (shudders)

    I also have occasional intense paranoia about sinkholes, which do actually happen where I grew up, but so rarely kill anyone that it is a completely irrational thing to worry about. But the idea that with hardly any warning, the ground under you could give way, and dump you into an underground river never to be seen again… that’s terrifying. Predictably, bouts of sinkhole-worrying tend to coincide with times when I’ve had to make a large decision based on incomplete information, and it’s not yet clear how it’ll turn out.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I used to have a paralyzing fear of an airplane falling on my head. Not being inside it, mind you, but having it fall on me. I’ve had many realistic dreams of airplanes falling on top of me. It hurts like a bastard.

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  4. Pen Avatar
    Pen

    Tornadoes. It’s always been tornadoes, ever since I was about two or three.

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  5. Stille (@aperfectbalance) Avatar
    Stille (@aperfectbalance)

    I’d love the psychoanalytic explanation if you have it (no worries if not, though!). When I was a kid I was deathly afraid of the world ending (and a nighttime prayer for children my neighbors had taught me that went quite similarly to ‘If I die before I wake/Pray the Lord my soul to take’ didn’t help things – I wrote about this a little at https://seasonoftowers.dreamwidth.org/1672.html). As an adult, I don’t actively fear it anymore, but I do have quite a bit of confirmation bias about living in the last days of Atlantis, so to say. If I raise my eyes to the future, I just see the black.

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  6. Tal Hartsfeld Avatar
    Tal Hartsfeld

    MY fear is of my life being disrupted by ANYTHING beyond my control, regardless of whether it’s by nature or by circumstance, or by the means of others (especially deviously or subversively—-but also even by the recklessness or stupidity of another).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That’s exactly how my husband feels, so I get it.

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