I don't remember becoming afraid of buoys I only remember being afraid of them. That is how you get to be a 36-year-old mother of two who is terrified of the floating dock at her friends' New Jersey lake house. In phobics, the fear brain and the thinking brain are not on speaking terms. It's the mind's primal defense, before the prefrontal cortex chimes in with information and context ( yes, that's a spider, but it's a daddy longlegs, not a black widow). Phobias live not in the thinking brain, but in the lizard brain-the part that told cavemen to run from predators. Don't bother telling an aviophobe she's more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash, or a claustrophobe that the walls are not, in fact, closing in on her. Most seem just as confused as I am about why, exactly, we're so scared.Īnd yet, though I know my fear is irrational, I can't talk myself out of it. I've discovered that this phobia has a name, submechanophobia, and a subreddit, whose 19,000-plus subscribers post pictures and videos-cruise ship propellers, scenes from Waterworld-that I'm too terrified to click on. Over the years I've realized that I'm afraid not just of buoys but of anything man-made that is underwater, including shipwrecks, boat motors, and pool cleaners. My phobia doesn't really impede my Brooklyn existence, but it's inconvenient on tropical vacations, not to mention on occasional ferry rides into Manhattan, during which I imagine in great detail the cardiac event that would occur if I were to fall overboard and drift into a harbor piling. adult population is phobic, making irrational fear one of the most common mental illnesses.Ī phobia is defined as a persistent, irrational fear that interferes with one's daily life. In my waking life, I would not do this for a million dollars.Īccording to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly 9 percent of the U.S. Sometimes I dream I'm swimming beneath a mooring field, navigating a watery maze of taut, ghostly chains. It's the thing itself, the whole harmless assemblage of steel and rubber. It's not even the slimy algae congealing on the underside of a buoy.
I'm not afraid of sea creatures, either: I'd happily swim with a whale if that didn't require jumping off a boat, which would inevitably drop an anchor line (my stomach flipped as I typed that). I am an excellent swimmer, thank you, a lifeguard on Lake Michigan back in college (never mind that if someone had been clinging for dear life to the shallow, dinky buoy that defined the far edge of the swimming area, I wouldn't have been able to save him). I imagine you have questions-most people do-so here are my answers: No, I'm not really scared of the ocean, or of drowning. Yes, I mean those benign inanimate objects that float in water, the ones you've probably never given a second thought to. Hello, my name is Meredith, and I am afraid of buoys. Getting any closer would cause me to faint. I knew he was rolling his eyes behind me, but I couldn't help it. "You're going to have to get us back by yourself," I gasped.
But my husband had seen it, too, and was already paddling in the opposite direction. In an instant my body seized up, my eyes squeezed shut, and my paddle collapsed onto my lap. It was 50 or so yards away, on a shimmering stretch of bay low-lit by the moon. I congratulated myself for being the kind of parent who lets her kid stay up past ten to witness miracles of nature.Īnd then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something flash white on the surface of the water. Our paddles pierced the water in delicious sunbursts of bright bluish-yellow we chatted with some newlyweds from Chicago. I shared a boat with my husband and toddler, trailing a logorrheic guide who stopped periodically to expound in broken English on the dinoflagellates' life cycle before disappearing again into the mist up ahead. The bay was large, the moon small, the blackness almost total. One night last fall, I kayaked with about 15 other tourists out into an empty bay on Vieques, an island off Puerto Rico, to see some famous glowing microorganisms. This article originally appeared in the June 2016 issue of ELLE.