Because real life + my imagination scare me enough. While for the most part jiu jitsu keeps my anxiety at bay, there are certain situations where no amount of jiu jitsu or any sort of physical activity will keep me from being at least moderately freaked out.
For work I was asked to take photos and take notes on an empty supermarket in the suburbs. Okay, not that scary, right?
Until we get there, and find the building been broken into multiple times, so not only are all the windows boarded up, but in the few times people did get in, they took all the copper wiring and trashed the place, so the electricity was off.
Let me tell you how harrowing it is to walk into a pitch black building with no idea what is inside.
There were two people with flashlights, but of course I did not have one, and so took lots of photos, with nothing but the flash of my camera giving me an idea of what the inside looked like. The down side to this of course is just as quickly as the flash went off, was I plunged back into the pitch black since my eyes couldn’t adjust to the drastic light change.
I took photos of all sorts of places, as my anxiety heightened after I took photo after photo and I became more and more convinced we were going to find a variety of things. A stray animal who would freak at the bright light of the flash, an altar stained with blood as kids played at being Satan-worshippers or some other macabre paraphernalia laying about, and then finally just a dead body strung up somewhere.
Nothing of the sort happened, and everything was fine, in case anyone was wondering. We left the building safe and sound, thankfully.
But in case you were ever wondering, no thank you, I do not want to see any scary movies. Like, ever.
A Skirt on the Mat 