Last week a friend asked me out to play badminton several times, and I turned him down every time. Finals had just ended, the weekend was drizzly in exactly the way I love, and it felt almost absurd to waste that perfect kind of day by going out in the rain, playing for hours, sweating through everything, then dragging myself home drained and weak, too tired to care about anything and too restless even to sleep without feeling like I was wasting time.
It wasn’t even that I had some exciting plan waiting for me at home. I don’t play games anymore; I quit video games a long time ago. My usual forms of entertainment are simple: reading, listening to music, drawing, practicing piano, maybe writing some code just to make myself suffer a little. What I depend on most is the time I get to spend alone indoors. As long as I’m away from the noise of other people, I can recharge.
They teased me for being a shut-in, for only wanting to stay home. I couldn’t really argue with that. It’s true. There isn’t even some complicated reason behind it. Home just feels safe, and I am, very plainly, someone who is deeply afraid of dying.
I went to my grandmother’s place today to pick up food, and it suddenly struck me that the whole area seems designed out of every element that makes me uneasy.
There’s a railway next to the residential complex, and trains tear past it all the time. I’m extremely sensitive to noise. Then I get to the building itself: two entrances on each side of the corridor, and of course any normal person would just take the elevator. That brings me to the second thing I fear: enclosed elevators.
When I was little, my grandmother tried to keep me safe by scaring me with stories about elevator accidents. I know now that most of those stories weren’t true, and I also know elevators have multiple layers of protection and are generally very safe. None of that changes what happens when I step inside one. Every time, I stare fixedly at the floor display, even though that obviously does nothing, and wait in dread of the thing shooting upward or dropping straight down, as if I might die inside an electronic coffin.
After enduring the elevator ride, there’s still the walk to the apartment door. Near the stairwell is a window that is always open and never sealed off. The corridor is narrow, and even looking down from a distance is enough to make my whole body tense. What unsettles me most is that for a split second, once or twice, I’ve had the thought of jumping. That makes no sense, because I’m supposed to be terrified of death. It’s hard to imagine how I spent so much of my childhood there, almost day after day.
That same instinct is part of why I dislike traveling too. Maybe it’s because recent trips have never felt especially good. There’s always the burden of dragging along my younger brother, who doesn’t know how to behave and somehow manages to make everyone miserable. Once everyone else is unhappy, there’s not much room left for me to enjoy anything either. Winter trips are freezing, summer trips are miserable in the heat, and tourist sites are packed wall to wall with people. It seems like only people with an enormous reserve of energy can actually find that fun.
I saw a relative post photos from a trip to Suzhou with her child, and I genuinely admired her for it. Taking your family across nearly half the country already feels impressive to me. In one of the photos, her child was standing on a boat with open water behind them.
Water is another one of the things that frighten me.
When I was young, I slipped while soaking in a hot spring and fell into a pool that was about two heads taller than I was. I thrashed in the water for what felt like half a minute before I managed to get out. Luckily I had held my breath, because at that height I had no control over which way my body was turning. In the end I grabbed onto a railing at the edge and saved myself from something much worse. Ever since then, fear of water has stayed with me. I may never in my life go to a water town like Suzhou, or even to the seaside.
Whenever I go on a trip—or sometimes even just cross an overpass—I start imagining disasters. The car suddenly losing control and plunging off the bridge. Family members getting separated. Falling into water. I can’t keep writing out the rest of the things I think about, because even putting them into words starts pulling me back into that fear.
Once, after reading one of my essays, a Chinese teacher said I was a very typical pessimist. I couldn’t deny it. That was exactly right.
So yes, if I stay home and avoid travel and other risky activities, part of it is simply self-preservation. It feels like the surest way to stay alive and keep my mind from falling apart.