Pantaphobia

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”

Helen Keller

I am not a great man. I am not a brilliant man. Not smart, not particularly handsome, I couldn't really say I was funny, not very charming. In fact, I would say I was one of the most uninteresting people ever to grace the face of the earth.

Pantophobia is an interesting word for a very uninteresting person but it's the one word I have heard numerous times when I am described. Doctors, therapists, heck even a hypnotherapist...or two. Pantophobia the fear of everything.

'Fear of everything. How can anyone fear everything?'

That's what you're thinking right? You are thinking that its not possibly that someone can fear everything because no one man, or woman mind you has seen everything in the world. Well fearing what you don't know, they call that Xenophobia. So you see it is possible. What do I fear? Quite literally everything. I fear touching the floor when I wake up because I'm still convinced something will come out from under my bed.

I remember when I was 4 I felt something touch me when I stepped out of bed. My parents to this day tell me that it was just a bad dream and also that moment was when my fears began. I fear something bad will happen in every situation because I believe.

Believe in what?

I believe that there is something that goes bump in the night, I have seen it. People will call me crazy, insane, out of my mind, deranged.

Unstable.

Yes that too. But I am not, unhinged I have seen what little children are terrified of, what hides in closets, under beds, in every dark corner of the world, and its not only children who need to fear it but man as well, you should fear it, them, those things. You should more than fear them you should be like me, afraid to even open your eyes in the morning because of what was looking at your through the dark while you slept.

Unless you are like me of course, I don't sleep. Not for long enough to go into a deep enough sleep that I am not on constant alert, because you see I am. I am constantly ready to run because you see I am a fearful man but I am also a coward. Fight or flight is a state of mind, an instinctive physiological response to a threatening situation, which readies one either to resist forcibly or to run away. In that situation I am not afraid to say I am the person who runs. Does that really surprise you though?

Not very much.

If I were anyone else I might be offended by that. If you had seen what I have you would run from it as well. What do you picture when someone talks to you about monsters, demons, fiends, savages.

Devils?

Yes those too, so what do you see, something dark, with monstrous claws, dark looming eyes, something so grand in size it hurts your neck to gaze upon. How wrong you are, this thing you do not gaze upon you would not dare too. For if you did, you would be frozen, paralysed in fear, not just someone made you jump fear, but the kind of fear that runs through you to your core, the kind of fear that leaves you breathless, lost in a void of darkness wondering if you will ever find an out, an escape, some way to become released from this crippling torment.

So what do they look like?

Picture what you do, then multiply it, imagine your worst fear, wrapped up in your most frightening nightmare while being suffocated by your own terrifying memory. They aren't large, giant, big, how can you describe the devil as he sits before you when you are gripped in terror. The eyes, eyes that aren't large, nor small, they don't glow some strange colour like you may have been lead to believe. They are dark, not black. Eyes like two black holes just waiting for you to come closer so they can pull you into a void that makes everything inside out. All that was once light now darkness and every bit of darkness in the world...

Light?

You would think that wouldn't you but no, the darkness these things create, can only become tenebrious, sinister, ominous.

So what do you call it then? What's its name?

What do you all something that brings such affright. Sev, what does it stand for...Seven, would be an odd name wouldn't it but maybe a little cliché, seven deadly sins and all. Sev-erely scary, you could call him anything, that thing that skulks in your darkness, for he doesn't just lurk in shadows, I believe he lives inside me, he is my own fear. I call him Sevrin.

Why?

Sevrin in Latin is a saints name, a beacon of light, hope in the world. I thought it seemed fitting, something that other people can see such light in only brings darkness into my life. The shadows, the spaces between, behind, those things you cant see in the pitch black night. That wickedness that is the very core of what you fear, used to fear maybe you do even to this day.

I am that darkness.