Sunday Scaries

Welcome to spooky season! My favourite time of year, and the only period when we embrace fear as something fun.

I’ve written a lot about being scared. As a rule, I live my life like I’m in the opening act of a horror movie: constantly on edge. My worry list is filled with concerns like I’m not doing enough, I’m running out of good ideas, or people will eventually figure out that I actually have no talent as a writer.

Mostly, I’m horrified that I won’t reach my own potential. I think most Millennials can relate.

In recent months the goals I had always assumed were a given seem farther away than ever. My husband and I want to buy a house and have a family. Somehow that’s radical. Each time we get our hopes up, news comes that makes the challenge feel insurmountable - price hikes, hidden condo feels, sloppy lawyers, co-signers refusing to help…

Our future house is already haunted

As our housing plans get more and more delayed, my body is decaying from the inside out. That sounds dramatic, but it’s not.

To date, very few women in my social circle have had an easy time getting pregnant. Approximately 1 in 6 Canadian couples experience infertility, a number that has doubled since the 1980s. The pandemic has only made the situation bleaker. In 2020, the fertility rate hit an all-time low of 1.40 children per woman.

Many factors could be causing the decline: more screens, GMOs, birth control...The most obvious are age and stress. Canada is considered a “late” childbearing country, with mothers averaging 31.3 years old at the time of delivery. The longer we spend clawing our way into financial stability, the greater the toll on our chances.

The reality doesn’t change the expectation. Millennials were a generation mocked for participation ribbons. Our parents told us we could be anything we wanted, so we grew up thinking the world was full of possibilities. Now many of us are confronting that the most basic of dreams - to raise a family in a nice house - are potentially out of reach. We’re forced to put the lives we want on hold until we achieve the financial security that, it turns out, doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing turned out the way it was promised.

The Millennial plotline was clearly written by M. Night Shyamalan.

*When family members ask when we’re going to have kids*

Like the stress in my womb, my fear for the future isn’t controllable. Once you’re scared, it seeps into your bones and wreaks havoc. I spend my afternoons stressing about my work and money only to find that I’m jumpy on the sidewalk. Every person I pass is a potential threat.

My paranoia is entirely justified. At a whopping 5”3 inches, anyone who wants to hurt me can - no matter how alert I am. As we’ve seen in the news, it doesn’t make a difference if you take precautions anyway.

Depressingly, the greatest dangers most women face are ones already in their lives. I’m more likely to die at the hands of my husband than a creep on the street (sorry, Mark). In fact, 47,000 women and girls worldwide were killed by their intimate partners or other family members in 2020. 47,000.

That doesn’t mean that being single is any less dangerous. In the last few years, dating apps have seen an increase of more than 18% in sexual assaults. Those cases also tend to be more violent.

Anecdotally, we’ve all heard a story that confirms these states. Earlier this week I was walking home with two friends when one of them recounted a terrible date.

“I felt unsafe,” she started, and we both nodded, thinking of times we’d been in similar positions.

The man in question had tried to lead her away from the lit street and into his car. He kept grabbing her arm and hip during the walk to push her into submission. As she retold the story, she berated herself for not speaking up at the time.

My friend interjected, “you never know when being rude will set them off more.”

As young women, most of our lives are spent sussing out danger and managing fear - both the existential dread of life and the literal men we’re afraid of. Horror is something engrained in every female mind.

Some of us learn to embrace it.

Horror movies and true crime are ways to direct antsy feelings into something concrete. More precisely, they offer a level of autonomy over fear. When you watch something scary, the stress comes from a specific source that can be paused, turned off, or muted at any point. And, as soon as the film or podcast is over, the threat subsides. The result is an effect similar to exposure therapy where people face their fears in controlled environments to minimize threats over time.

It’s a way to vacuum up my demons and direct them somewhere else. Like a Ghostbuster.

In 2019, women’s interest in true crime rose by 16%. Similarly, studies have shown that women love watching female characters persevere in horror films. The experience is cathartic, largely because most of us have felt like a Final Girl before (generally more than once). When we see these characters frantically trying to escape, we recognize ourselves. When she survives, we think maybe that’s attainable for us.

It also reminds us that we aren’t alone. Even on our worst dates and in the darkest alleys, many of us have other women to lean on. There is a sisterhood peppering my phone with “did you get home safe?” texts at all times. My friends and I willingly share phone locations because it’s comforting to know someone else is watching.

That’s the closest I’ll ever feel to having a guardian angel.

When everything is scary, spooky season becomes a relief. October is when we celebrate the screams and acknowledge the fear many of us face all the time. For someone perpetually nervous, seeing everyone indulge is the greatest treat of all.

Going through fear-arousing situations can also create intimacy. Around Halloween, we bond over the things that go bump in the night and the thoughts that were keeping us up anyway.

The solidarity allows me to accept that the home we find might be filled with ghosts, my friends could be murdered at any point, and any daughters I do have will be subject to the same horrors I’ve seen. I displace that usual stress into places that are manufactured. For an evening, I can leave my anxiety behind in teenager-run haunted house filled with plastic body parts. For an hour, I can watch Dahmer and swap notions about shrivelling eggs for nausea about cannibalism. For a glorious heartbeat, I’m worried about a jump scare and nothing else.

That’s how I rest in peace.

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