30 irrational fears you didn’t know you also had

There’s something horribly wrong with mayonnaise, and it terrifies me to the point that I can’t think straight if I know it’s in the same room as me. The combination of its disgustingly off-white color, its thick appearance, and the way it lands on the corners of the mouths of those daring enough to consume it causes internal and external shook-ness. I run from it. I yell at it. I fear if it gets too close it will send me into a life-long puking fit.

If mayo has touched any part of any meal, it’s lights out. You can’t scrape it off. Anything it touches, it ruins. There are parts of my childhood I’ll never get back. One time my dad told me to just wipe the mayo off the bread of my Wendy’s crispy chicken sandwich and that was nearly it for us.

I’m not alone in this battle against mayo. I can’t be.

I will soon start a GoFundMe to launch that heaping pile of garbage to the moon. Not Earth’s moon, that’s too close. I’m thinking one of Jupiter’s moons.

Anyhoo, I asked Twitter, and a few of my co-workers about some of their irrational fears. Somehow, things got weirder than mayo, like string cheese, salad bars, and sloths.

Wet paper napkins, to be clear. A lot of thin paper products. I never blew my nose on a Kleenex in school (paper towels were fine). Straw paper really freaks me out too. Why? I don’t really know, a texture thing, I guess. — Ryan Van Bibber

I saw a Twilight Zone episode that I wasn’t ready for. — Kofie Yeboah

This is a very specific fear, and one I’d call more of an anxiety. This all stems back to some very specific Navy training in which they simulate a helicopter crashing and you have to escape. What you may not know is, when they hit the water, helicopters FLIP UPSIDE DOWN as they sink. Yes, flip upside down. This complicates things greatly and now leads me to drive across bridges with one hand on the window control button and pondering how I’d complete my underwater egress. Oh, and clowns. Clowns suck. — Caroline Darney

What if a piece of chalk had the consistency of rubber? I don’t know, and I’ll never find out. — Pete Volk

Descending into a giant hole, with no guardrails along the way, seems like it should scare anybody, but some people were running down. I think I mainly couldn’t handle watching my daughter walk down the thin slope right next to the drastic plummet, because walking back up wasn’t scary. I’m sorry for my apparently irrational fear of exercising my way into the Sarlacc pit. — Jason Kirk

Clowns. And snakes! Also being sucked out into the vortex of space with a spacesuit on, so I can’t just die immediately and instead have to just float away, into infinity, until I either perish from dehydration, alone, or make the decision to just rip the helmet off and embrace the sweet, cold clutch of death. Oh, also spiders. Icky. — Nate Scott

I love to scroll through Google Maps when I’m bored and just look at random places, but I get absolutely petrified when I scroll too far and end up with a screen that is just full of dark blue water. It’s just really creepy being out in the ocean and frantically scrolling in a bunch of different directions to find land. It makes me feel like I’m some person lost at sea like in Life of Pi dying of exposure and thirst. Maybe I’m just scared of the actual ocean. Ever hear of Thalassophobia?

Welp, I suppose it’s time to admit this to my colleagues and the rest of the world: I lose my shit if I see a frog or toad in real life or even a photo of one. That makes it a little difficult 1) living by a creek, and 2) watching TV when every other laundry detergent commercial thinks “I know what will help sell the idea of crisp, clean clothes: a disgusting, wart-covered amphibian!”

Alas, there’s no reason whatsoever for my aversion. I’ve never had a traumatic experience with frogs and I know they won’t hurt me, poisonous species aside. I’ve just never been able to look at one. It’s truly an irrational fear. My best guess is that it’s primitive, since I also have a very minor case of trypophobia (I can look at clusters, I just find them unsettling).

Matt, please, please don’t include a picture of a real frog in this post. Kermit or Michigan J. Frog is allowed, though. — Sarah Hardy

Yes, I did specifically phrase my fear in that way so you have the song stuck in your head now. You’re very welcome. I have no clue how I got this fear but I can’t stand to be in open, empty spaces. Packed crowds, a tight bunk, or busy areas? Totally fine (except in rare situations where it seems like things might be about to get out of hand in some way — which feels like a normal reaction).

But if I’m in an empty field or a big parking lot with no one else in sight, that viscerally bothers me. I can’t stand feeling like there could be something out there that I’m somehow not noticing or can’t see. Completely unsettling. — Whitney McIntosh

I’d consider myself a rational person, so admitting I have an irrational fear is a toughy. However, sloths (a commonly adored animal friend) give me the heebie-geebies. When I see pictures of tourists allowing sloths to hang around their necks, I cringe. I have not been close enough to a sloth (out of fear of course) to know for sure, nor have I had the bravery to spend time researching the creature to find out, but I imagine them to be greasy and garbage-scented. I think the meme that circulated a few years ago depicting a sloth whispering various inappropriate phrases into this innocent women’s ear solidified my fear:

Waking up in the middle of the night with a sloth’s weird dagger-like nails and stringy arm wrapped around my neck with hot garbage sloth breath in my ear is where my nightmares are born. — Sarah Heilman

My local airport is Reagan National in D.C. The runway there is right next to the Potomac River. I have taken to closing my window during landings there, because from the side vantage point, all I can see is the plane getting really close to the water. I can’t see that there’s runway in front of me, and I assume my life is about to end. — Alex Kirshner

I’d like to begin by saying I believe my fear is totally rational. Anyway, salad bars are breeding grounds for people using their unwashed poop hands to touch my potential food. The whole thing is a damn minefield. How long has the lettuce been there? Did this cottage cheese get left out overnight? How often do they clean the food bins? THEN on top of all that it seems like we get a quarterly report of “Oh whoops! LOL. You’re going to get E Coli and die from eating [insert green thing here].” I like salad. I like the option to choose my own food stuffs without the hassle of preparation. The entire salad bar concept can die in a fire. — James Dator

I get a lot of awful invasive thoughts, but the worst typically comes when I’m walking to or from my car at the beach, then consider just how awful it would be if my feet decided to stop working and just flop along the cement walkway, peeling back layers of healthy skin and making it impossible to wear shoes for weeks. Get the fuck out of here, flip flops. I’m not falling for your game. — Christian D’Andrea

I don’t know if this is a “fear” so much as “crippling uncomfortableness,” but the people who created the talking M&Ms can fuck right off:

Or the talking Tostitos bag:

Or this monstrosity that I just found:

Everything about these commercials is horrible: The cavalier attitudes these possessed foodstuffs have towards their own mortality, the glee with which real people want to devour these things whole and alive, and how casually this wanton murder is portrayed.

Tell me, when you eat the chips out of a talking Tostito’s bag, what are you eating exactly? Its brains? Its guts? Its soul? Does it die when you get to the bottom of the bag? Is it immortal and destined to live breathless and sad in a landfill for the rest of eternity after you throw it out? What exactly is the social contract between food and humans here? Is food our slaves?

Talking tomatoes aren’t cute. M&Ms trying to escape human clutches because — Ha! Ha! Ha! — they’ll be eaten and dead if they don’t isn’t cute. These commercials make me want to change the channel faster than even those terrible Sarah McLachlan commercials. No, nothing about this feeling is rational but IDC. I hate you talking food. — Louis Bien

Spiders are the embodiment of evil. Yes, I’m aware that they help control the insect population and whatnot, but here’s the thing: I don’t care, because they’re creepy as hell and I hate them and they terrify me. One time I had a dream that someone was trying to kill me and the murderer was standing right beside my bed, and I woke up, and a wolf spider was in the exact spot where I dreamed the murderer was standing. This seems like objective proof that spiders are very bad. I rest my case. — Jeanna Thomas

It has to happen one day, I just might not be here for it. — Harry Lyles Jr.

It was the first day of Pre-K. I was walking along to get there and a praying mantis just fell out of the sky onto my chest. It stayed there for a good minute or two while I wailed. It hasn’t happened since, but I’m sure I’d wail again. — Russ Oates

When I was just a boy growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I spent a lot of time outside. We didn’t have a lot of reason to stay indoors on nice days, so it wasn’t hard to find us just resting against the trunk of a tree reading a comic book, or down at the creek fishing for brook trout. But once, while lounging in a field near my house and staring up into the perfectly blue sky, my brother offhandedly mentioned that if the world stopped spinning, we would all fall into the sky and into space and die. It terrified me. Suddenly I felt like I was falling. I gripped the grass around me in a desperate attempt to keep myself grounded. My heart jumped into my throat. I began to panic until I rolled over and stared wide-eyed into the dirt. You’d think this would be a one-time thing, but the feeling overwhelms me anytime I stare into the blue sky too long. Not the night sky. Not a cloudy day. But that pure blue sky. And it frightens me. I quake when I do it. I feel that familiar panic and want nothing more than to scream and run to safety. Irrational, I know, but a fear nonetheless. — Sam Eggleston

The only burns I want are the ones I can get from the internet. —Brittany Cheng

Because I am an expert at rationalizing my irrational thoughts until they seem so sane and considered that it’s actually weird you don’t have them yourself, I sought outside insight into my fears and phobias. I turned to the person who most consistently sees me in my most fearful moments: my girlfriend.

Yes, this all checks out. She knows me. Uh oh.

Mayo is bad. This has been established. Fake vegan mayo is even creepier because it is a science project approximation of something already unsettling. Basically, every faux food is almost certainly Soylent Green. I’m pretty sure. That or it’s a Snowpiercer situation. Trust me, I’m a vegetarian. Hmm, hair salons? That’s new to me. But also I just recently got my first haircut since 2014 and it occurred at home so she might be onto something. It’s definitely true that leaving Chubbs — SB Nation’s famous blogging cat — home alone for too long is something that inspires anxiety in me on par with standing on a balcony on a high floor of a tall building. In other words, LET’S GO INSIDE WITH CHUBBS. But also, always remember that large insects with exoskeletons and/or hair are terrifying and clearly preparing for either a battle against the humans or to somehow infiltrate our society in order to do us harm. —Chris Greenberg