Sleeping is Terrifying.

Basically, everything makes me nervous. I know being neurotic is trendy or whatever right now, which I don't really get, but whatever. I'm not talking cool neurosis. I'm not even sure what that is. I'm talking the kind of nervous that makes you so reluctant to go make a reservation in the school's editing lab that you seriously consider just not editing your project cause what if you call the equipment the wrong thing and the people working there think you're really dumb and then you look stupid?

That's me. All the goddamn time. I wake up in the middle of the night worried that I've forgotten homework, overdrawn my bank account without noticing, contracted some disease, gotten pregnant (which I was worrying about way before I ever had sex, or even before I had a boyfriend--what if some stranger had sneaked into my room and inseminated me without me knowing? I AM NOT MAKING THAT UP I ACTUALLY WORRIED ABOUT THAT). There is almost nothing in the world that cannot cause me concern.

But, despite all this worrying, nothing makes me more nervous than sleeping at home. To clarify one thing before I go into any of this: my home is the best, safest, and most wonderful place there is. My parents are great people, I live in a good area, there's basically no crime in my immediate area, and I trust my neighbors.

At school, I live in a big building of strangers in the middle of Boston. Any given night, I can hear homeless people yelling at each other, the T making horrible squawking noises as it goes by, garbage trucks, cop cars, drunk people, loud music, construction, and all kinds of weird noises I can only assume are monsters coming to take over the world. In addition to this, my neighbor controls my heat, and, as far as I can tell, she's from either Hell or the Sahara, and keeps the temperature absurdly hot, and I share a twin bed with my 6'2" boyfriend. I sleep like a rock at school.

At home, however, I have been plagued with sleepless nights for years. I can trace this back to a specific point in my childhood, and it is all the fault of my horrible sadistic ballet teacher. This woman, given the responsibility of a herd of fourth grade girls, decided to celebrate Halloween by sharing impossibly terrifying urban legends about sleepovers interrupted by brutal serial killers. In one story, the killer makes himself known by breathing down the neck of the sleeping heroine, who assumes he is her dog. I'm pretty sure that makes him the most retarded, least sneaky serial killer ever, but that's not something ten-year-old me was concerned with. The basic lesson I got from the story was that serial killers can get into your room and will breath on your neck before violently slaughtering everyone you love and writing messages on mirrors in your friends' blood.

So, for about five years after that, I couldn't sleep unless my closet door was closed (so I couldn't see the serial killer) and my sheets were totally covering my neck (so I couldn't feel his murderous breath). Apparently, as long as I was completely unaware of the presence of a serial killer, I was set. He could kill me in my sleep as long as he didn't scare me first.

But all these means of hiding didn't prevent me from being able to hear. And houses make noise. I also live in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, which means there are animals. Every single creak, every bird chirping, every rustling tree was some horrible drug addicted man sneaking into my house with a GIANT knife covered in rust and tetanus, which he would use to perforate me like a safety seal on a bottle of ketchup. Maybe if I kept still and just didn't make any noise, he wouldn't hear me and he'd think the room was empty.

Then in occurred to me that if he didn't notice and kill me, he'd still probably find my parents and murder them, and then I'd wake up and find them all bloody and dead in their bedroom, and then I'd be alone and traumatized.

Most of the time I'd end up squeezing my eyes shut and praying to God to let me not die that night until I fell asleep.

Then we got raccoons.

For someone who is already mortally terrified of burglars, the worst thing that could ever happen is to have a bunch of nocturnal creatures skittering around on the gravel outside one's house, making footstep noises and knocking things over. Until my parents explained that a bunch of masked rodents were vandalizing our trash cans every night, I spent every evening completely positive I was going to die, right there, that very night. For clarification, this was just last year. This is still how my mind works. In fact, after I publish this, I'm going to go upstairs to bed and probably lie there for an hour or so waiting for someone to slowly open the door and stab me to death.

If I remembered that ballet teacher's name, I would track her down and punch her right in the mouth.