Elderscare: Things I Fear as an Adult
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Most people who are done with puberty don't find Halloween scary anymore (although I must admit I find disguised children bothering me in my home with demands of sugary snacks quite unsettling). I wish I could say that I don't find anything at all scary anymore – I am, after all, a Real Life Adult, and have been for over a year now. The fact is, sadly, that I am still scared of a lot of things. Some things have diminished; after being put in charge of the phone at work I can now deal with basically any phone call with zero anxiety. Some have remained pretty constant throughout my life, like being on a plane (it's not OK and you will never convince me that it is OK). Some are new things that I never really considered before I left university, but now bother me with a gnawing fear that slowly cripples me with paralysing terror if I allow myself to become preoccupied with them for too long. In 2016, in honour of the apparently scariest night of the year, I bring to you a list of things that scare me now I am an adult.
Hangovers
Not only are my hangovers now absolutely catastrophic, I barely even need to be drunk to experience them. Whereas when I was at university I could make some extremely medically questionable decisions and merrily go off to lectures the next day, now I wake up with a pounding headache if I have so much as two glasses of wine without an accompanying gallon of water. So great is my fear of hangovers (which now last well into the afternoon, by the way) that it's stopped me from going out on more than one occasion, and probably will continue to until I can find a way to conveniently hook myself up to a drip while out and about.
Developing a Surprise Food Intolerance
The number of people I've heard of who developed a food intolerance in adulthood is deeply concerning. For me, lactose would be the worst. My love for cheese is such that if the time comes that I'm told I can't eat dairy products anymore I'm just going to have to die. However, the prospect of suddenly being told I have to cut anything out of my diet is unappealing. An obvious exception, of course, is raisins. I know multiple people who've found their ability to digest dried fruit comfortably has depleted with age. I'm more than happy to be one of those people.
Crap Nights Out
FOMO is for freshers. At the age of twenty-three I now suffer from FOSANIASCWICBOTSET – Fear Of Spending All Night In A Shit Club When I Could Be On The Sofa Eating Takeaway. Gone are the days when I forced myself to spend hours in the downright terrible Bunker because I didn't want to miss out on potential fun. In 2014 I decided that I am no longer paying for a night out if I'm not certain that I'm going to enjoy the music, which means I enter clubs roughly four times a year and they are, without fail, exceptionally expensive, loud, and sticky. The rest of the time I'm in a nice chilled pub, or, better still, lying on my sofa eating Pringles, watching Friends, and not having to talk to anyone at all.
Social Situations in which I Am Forced to Drink Bad Wine out of Politeness
Did you really just bring Australian Chardonnay into my house?
Being Evicted
Twelve-month student houses are a thing of my past. Of course, so are damp, mould, and accidentally treading slugs into the carpet, but life felt easier when I knew exactly how long I would be living in a place before I had to find a new one. As an adult, my days are marked by the constant fear of finding on my doormat a letter signalling the news that my home is being sold and I'm going to have to go and live in the Bear Pit. I also own my own furniture now, which means that moving house requires a van. Do you know how difficult it is to find a van man in Bristol whose name doesn't include the prefix 'dodgy'? More difficult than you might think.
Frozen Shoulders
OK, this one may seem a bit weird, but have you ever known someone who has a frozen shoulder, or stumbled across them after spending your lunch break masochistically browsing the NHS website? Of course you haven't, because if you had you wouldn't be questioning me. To summarise briefly, it turns out shoulders can just one day decide they're not going to work properly anymore. Instead of moving freely and comfortably, they're going to spend two to nine months painfully seizing up and then stay that way for a while. According to the NHS website, 'the condition may improve with time, but this can sometimes take several years.' Several. Years. Several years of 'persistent shoulder pain that limits your movement', the possibility of 'not being able to move your shoulder at all', and your shoulder muscles 'wasting away'*. The worst thing about frozen shoulders is that no one seems to be sure what causes them, which means that there isn't any advice on how to prevent them from happening to you. You just have to carry on with life and hope you're one of the 19 in 20 people whose vital joints aren't going to spontaneously betray them. If those odds aren't scary then I don't know what is.
*All quoted from the NHS, although I would not recommend you follow this link if you suffer from even mild hypochondria: http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Frozen-shoulder/Pages/Symptoms.aspx
Image credit: Susanne Nilsson
Image credit: Susanne Nilsson
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