Everyday Canvas

Imagined Disasters

Prompt: Does your mind wander to the scariest thoughts possible, about what could happen in any given situation, even if the chances of the scary stuff happening is minimal? If you could come up with a nervous character like that in your writing, what would he or she be scared of and in which situations?

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Not really. If I sense a slight threat with anything, that might happen, but it is highly unlikely. One reason is that when I was in my teens I read the essays of Montaigne. One line from them has been a good reference for me. “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”

This helped me a lot, then, because at the time, we were living in a wood-frame house and there were many fires around. Each day I went to school, I felt terrified that our house would catch fire with my mother and grandmother in it, and stress hormones flooded my mind and body. Reading Montaigne calmed me down, and our house never caught fire. I guess I was a nervous kid in my very young days because each time I’d take a test, I’d worry that I failed it or received a lowly grade. That, too, never happened. I was actually a very good student. My mother never believed me when I told her the test didn’t go well. This went on all the way to college.

I think people develop such fears and insecurities out of not being in control of their lives, and I believe I am cured by now of expecting disaster. If anything, I am on the smug side, but if I were to come up with a character like that, I would make her or him have serious enough phobias, fear of flying, clowns, closets, driving, etc., and I would probably give him or her an unusually strong imagination and then, have some things happen, a la Stephen King, to cause these fears. The story could be a tale of terror or a comedy, plus with other menus of possibilities rising from the character’s inner world of imagination in conflict with his/her outer world of reality.