So I’ve been having a lot of fits lately with stairs. I have, after all, a slight phobia of stairs, but normally it’s not too bad on stairs I climb all the time like the ones in the apartment or the ones here at work. There are staircases out there (and I can think of at least three clear examples) that paralyze me in mid-step, but I’m not around them much. However, for the past three or four weeks, all stairs have been giving me grief. It’s a weird phobia to have, I know, but it’s not unlike being afraid of confined spaces or spiders. I have my own reasoning behind it, and while it’s irrational and strange, it’s still here despite all my attempts to use logic to get rid of it. Damn you, stairs, damn you!

Normally, there are a lot of factors I tie into my stairs phobia (bathmophobia, I believe it’s called), but lately it doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m carrying something, using the handrail, or walking alone on the staircase. They’re getting to me, and I’ve been thinking I’m going to fall more and more lately. I dunno, maybe it’s the nervousness I’d been building up before going to get the bride’s maid dress fitted. Maybe it’s because I’m stuck in a closet where my SAD is flaring up pretty bad and it’s just making me more sensitive to my other phobias and disorders like my anginaphobia (fear of suffocating or choking–this office is so closed off I feel like I can’t breathe or get enough fresh air even with the door open and the AC on). I dunno. But I’ve been getting more paranoid about the stairs here, especially when walking down. It has even carried over to the stairs at home. I thought I was pretty okay with those (though the basement stairs are still creepy), but lately I’ve found myself getting nervous climbing or descending them as well. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve been more worried about descending the stairs here and climbing the stairs at home. Weird, huh? Yeah, not much normal going on in my head.

So the stairs are all out to get me. I often wonder if I could be anymore lame than I already am, but I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve got health problems out the wazoo which I can do little about (There’s no cure for arthritis or diabetes yet, yay.), and I’ve got mood disorders and mental breaks all over the place that just won’t go away despite how much I try to be normal. I mean, getting rid of the chronic depression and masochism was great, but I still have all these phobias and this stupid SAD to contend with. I can’t win. Being afraid of stairs is just a shining example of how much I suck. Humph. Well, now that I’m feeling pretty low about being a freak, I think I’m going to spend the rest of the day at work cross stitching and reading on-line comics. That’ll make me more normal. Yeah right.