Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.
- Mar 3, 2019

Pried Out Of My Phobia!

I do not think of myself as the sort of person who would be subject to a phobia but when I first learned to drive an automobile, I kept having to drive across the massive, multilane bridges over the mighty Mississippi River that winds through the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, and I realized that I had an extreme and irrational fear of falling into the river and drowning. Each drive across the river put me into a heart palpitating sweat. What terrified me was not the almost certainly fatal plunge down into the icy river if the bridge collapsed (as indeed sections of the bridges did fail several times during the 20th century and people did perish), but I quailed at the thought of surviving the fall only to drown because I was trapped in my car below the waters and I could not open a window. After I placed this nine inch iron pry bar by my feet on the floor, I had no more fears of drowning in my car after driving off of a bridge into a river. I feel delusionally confident that should my highly unlikely phobia become reality, I could use the nine inch iron pry bar to bash my way through the car window and swim out to safety.

Strangely, my mother told me that maternal grandfather, to whom I never spoke, had had the exact same phobia.