14 Signs You’re Slightly (But Totally Rationally) Paranoid
By Johanna Mort
1. You have a natural disaster survival kit in your house. And your car. And your office. Really, you can never be too prepared.
2. If you walk into any room that’s even slightly crowded, you automatically look for the Maximum Capacity sign. Your friends laugh at you, but THOSE LIMITS ARE THERE FOR A REASON.
3. Whenever you walk onto an airplane, you’re constantly scanning for any signs of trouble, like duct tape on a wing, or a drunk pilot, because if you see those, just nope.
4. If you have the choice of picking your seat, you’ll always choose the one right next to the emergency exit, because if that plane’s going down, you’re going to be the first one off of that hellhole.
5. Plus, you’re probably the most qualified person to sit there, since you’re the only passenger on the plane that religiously studies those emergency landing instruction booklets.
6. You wrote out an early draft of your will when you were ten, because even then you knew that anything could happen and you needed to make sure your LEGOs went to the right sibling.
7. Every odd looking freckle is cancer until proven innocent.
8. If Ross Gellar’s concept of Unagi were an actual thing, you’d have it in spades.
9. Yes, you check behind the shower curtain whenever you get home late at night. No serial killers are sneaking up on you tonight!
10. You check the locks on your doors almost obsessively when you’re home alone. INTRUDERS AREN’T A JOKE.
11. And then any foreign sounds or creaks from your apartment warrant you to freeze like a deer in the headlights and then cautiously investigate the source of the sound. Every time. No chances taken.
12. You’re always the first to know about any outbreaks in your area. And by “your area,” you mean if West Nile is on your continent, you’re on high alert.
13. You wash your hands in public restrooms like you’re a surgeon about to head into surgery. No surface of your exposed arms can be unscrubbed.
14. When a person behind you has been walking in the same direction as you, you start to take mental notes on exactly what they look like, just in case you need to describe them to the police. You’ve never had to, and know that this old woman is probably very kind, but BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY.