OTTESSA MOSHFEGH: Ready?
Number 1. Insanity. Like, a fear of going crazy, I feel like is, should be pretty standard. It’s like, you know if I lose my mind, I could do things that I wouldn't want to do. I could end up incarcerated. I could end up killing someone by accident or on purpose.
Number 2. Being incarcerated.
Number 3. Insomnia. I wrote this down because it's more of a daily fear that I deal with. I mean there are a lot of things that you can do when you're tired. But writing a book is really hard to do.
Number 4. Being paralyzed.
Number 5. Falling.
Number 6. Being lost in space. Essentially, it is like the astronaut who gets separated from her satellite that she's fixing, and then the idea is that you are completely adrift in outer space and you are just waiting for your body to die.
Number 7. War or regime change. Anything like that. Everything gets rewritten and rewritten and rewritten, you you don't know, you know, how to go about your business. You never know what's going to happen. My parents moved to Iran in the late 70s, I think right before shit was really starting to hit the fan, and they were building house. They had my, my older sister had been born and it seemed like really quickly things shifted dramatically, got extremely violent, um there were a lot of threats and then there was like a flat out demand that you had to leave. That like my my entire family had to leave, and they did.
Number 8. My whole family dying.
Number 9. Killing someone by accident.
Number 10. Hitting a dog or watching a dog get hit by a car. The first dog I had was never on a leash and then we got this other dog named Lulu who was a wild wolf. She was so beautiful and so angry that she had to like live in a house and my brother was walking her one day, and he hadn't, or no one had noticed that she'd been chewing at her leash and as he was walking her just like around the block from where where we grew up, like we've walked this way a million times, she broke off her leash and just ran in front of a truck. Like as though she meant to and then my brother had to go pick her up and carry her home as she was dying and I can't, like I don't know how you live with that, like watching an animal that you love kill herself.
My name is Ottessa Moshfegh, and these are ten things that scare me.
