I am phobic. I try not to let it show, or at least try not to keep myself from doing things, and most of the time I'm pretty successful. Sometimes my phobias are just passing complexes that pop up unexpectedly, and then quietly fade away. The rest of the time, my phobias seem to be pretty permanent, like my fear of spiders, heights and injections.

Recently, I developed a new phobia which I find particularly fascinating, in a Jungian analysis kind of way. Everytime I walk up a case of stairs, this little nagging thought pops up in the back of my mind that I must be careful of my steps, because if I trip, I'll land teeth first on the hard unforgiving corner of the stairs and knock them all out. Then the little nagging thought becomes a rather vivid picture of the experience, a la Matthew Barney having his teeth knocked out after the horse race in Cremaster 3. My favorite is the tingling feeling that stays in my gums after I've imagined with great detail the feeling of my teeth breaking from the bone, pushing through the back side of my gums and clattering their way down my throat. Conversely, when I'm traveling down a case of stairs, I think I'm going to lose my footing and go careening down the flight, breaking all the bones in my body. Somehow that doesn't bother me as much until I imagine my shins breaking, and then it makes me cringe a bit more. I've never broken a bone, or had a tooth knocked out, so I don't really know where these imaginations come from, but I guess that's not really the point.

The part I find most interesting about this random new addition to my vast collection of neuroses, is that it first came up as I was walking down some stairs into the main shopping area in the Frankfurt airport arriving from the States with no intention of returning to the land of the free. By the time I got to Berlin and had to climb the three flights of stairs to my apartment, the sneaky little phobia was firmly in place. So, okay, fine- I was ditching a lifetime of living in California, the US, whatever. I'm sure I felt a little shaky about whether I'd made a good descision, whether I'd figure out what my plan was. I get that it came up during that period of time. What I don't get is how it's stayed. I'm back. Things are pretty normal. Things are pretty good. Aside from my permanent-vacation-status, things are pretty much going according to plan. Can't I walk up a couple of steps without having to breathe deeply and calm my internal freak out? I suppose what the fear is trying to tell me is to stop pussy-footing around and get my self gainfully employed so that I can stand confident with both feet firmly on the ground. Or the stairs.

Or whatever, where ever I happen to be.