Afraid of Myself: An Exploration through Anxiety

Abstract

To me, writing horror was a way to channel and accept my own fears and anxiety. My mother had told me that at around age five I was diagnosed with sensory integration disorder and later ADHD. Meaning that I had difficulty taking in and processing information through the senses. Situations like the loud rumbling of the subway trains coming in or large crowds would overwhelm me easily and cause me to have breakdowns in tears or in screams. To this day, I still struggle with feeling comfortable in large crowds or unfamiliar settings. In order to really confront myself and my fears, I wanted to take social anxiety I’ve either witnessed or experienced and try to transform them into fiction. Ultimately, my goal with my senior project is to use fear and anxiety within fiction to understand human behavior. A big challenge of writing this project is trying to be original. When writing horror fiction, it’s difficult to avoid clichés and not reuse old tropes. What comes to mind when I first thought of writing about fear, my mind instantly went to spiders (I’m a huge arachnophobe). To which my immediate next thought was, who hasn’t read at least one scary story about spiders? A lot of the concepts that come to mind have been done before. I didn’t want to write some contrived ghost story, I wanted to write about fears that are realistic and ones that people think about every day. Outside of my anxiety, my love for horror truly came to life when I read Carrie by Stephen King. When I read this book, I related to the main protagonist of King’s novel. Carrie White was an ostracized girl who was the victim of bullying by the hands of her classmates and by her own mother. I related to Carrie in the sense where I was also bullied to in grade school. So much so that I feared interacting with people, I didn’t know who was genuine and who had ill intentions. Paranoia became natural for me because I wasn’t sure who to trust growing up. What made Carrie such an important story to me was understanding that horror doesn’t have to be monsters or ghosts. Sometimes horror can stem from how cruel people can be to one another. For the characters I write in each of the stories I’m crafting, it was important for them to start in unfavorable social circumstances to see how they react. In my first story, titled Where Darnell Went, my protagonist, Patrick is placed in a situation where he has to find his friend Darnell after she goes missing on a camping trip. In this story, he leaves his girlfriend Paris behind to look for Darnell on his own; in his journey, he questions his friendship with Darnell and who she is to him. When the three of them are together, Darnell oversteps her boundaries in subtle ways that she doesn’t even realize. Tensions between them become higher as they are stalked by a shapeshifting entity that plays on the sexual tension between the three of them. Patrick is left in a position where he wants to save Darnell, but ultimately realizes he doesn’t know how much help he has to offer. Another story featured in this collection is, Children of Ashes, where my main character Alan accidentally sets his house on fire after a night of sleeping with his mistress. Alan is forced to live with his estranged son while being stalked by the angered ashes of his now burnt down-home. Similar to the first story, I wanted the protagonist to have to confront their feelings in the face of the supernatural. Alan is a selfish, cheating, and a fair-weathered father who is forced to confront his actions when his house comes back to haunt him as the ashes he carelessly left to burn. My last story to mention is titled, Befriending the Cage. Young Mavis runs away from home after a physical altercation with her older sister. She sleeps on a bus bench overnight only to be kidnapped by two men who throw her in a cage. Mavis talks to herself out loud inside the cage, only for the cage to start talking back to her. The cage itself doesn’t want to let her go because it doesn’t want to be alone, Mavis realizes her only chance of escape is to become its friend and understand it. Mavis has to question her circumstances and think about if the cage is really talking to her or if she’s slowly losing her grip on reality. What I want this collection to accomplish is a new take on horror fiction where we look at fears we might face in everyday life and understand what it means to struggle with anxiety. Even more than this, I want readers to understand that anxiety is normal and can be really scary, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it constructively to make art. I want to inspire other people who struggle with anxiety or with trouble handling their emotions that they can channel that into something they’re passionate about. Sometimes, well, most times our fears can be our biggest motivators.