On Mental Stability

Every once in awhile I get an inkling that I might not be as mentally stable as I like to think. Today it occurred to me that I may have actual paranoia or anxiety. I was relaying a few stories to the guys at work about thinking some one wanted to kill me. The guys joked about it to the point that I realized that this happens quite often. I started to think about it and wondered if I was more paranoid than the average American. Here's a couple of the things that got me thinking:

1. Whenever I come home, I check in the closets, behind all the doors and behind the shower curtain to be sure that no one is there. Actually the shower curtain probably gets checked several times while I'm home, just in case some one crawled in there while I wasn't looking.

2. I absolutely refuse to live in a big house because I have to be able to hear if some one comes in through a window or is moving around in another room.

3. If there is a car behind me for awhile, I assume they are following me and I drive around in circles until they turn.

4. I'm afraid to go run or hike in the woods because I might be shot by a hunter mistaking me for a deer. As well as I may be attacked by a person or wild animal.

So I was wondering if maybe I had true, legit paranoia. I googled it. Wow, there are some crazy people out there. Maybe I'm delusional, I don't know, I'll have to look that up too. But I am so very far from having clinical paranoia that we might as well be opposites. I read this stuff and think: people actually think this way?

Looking up stuff under anxiety wasn't very helpful either. So I googled "looking behing the shower curtain". You would not believe how many people actually do this on a regular basis. I'm just glad there's drawers under my bed or I'd have to look under there too. Apparently this is all "normal". I just thought I was being ridiculous. Turns out I'm just being cautious. I mean it happens, right? People come home and they don't know there's some one hiding in their closet. Then they go to sleep and the person comes out and kills them. Seriously. It happens. Not just for movies anymore.

But as it turns out, a lot of people check behind the shower curtain for the boogey man. That and it's been proven that I have a very active imagination anyway.