by Miss October Kellee Mayfield, Delta Moxie

October is the month of all things scary, spooky and phobic. Arkansas Women Bloggers’ theme this month is Phobias.

Ask my husband or my daughter and they’ll tell you I have some fears. Report a spider is creeping on me and I will immediately go into a high-stepping, arm-flailing, full-glass-of-iced-tea throwing fool as I hyper focus on removing that eight-legged creature from my personal space.

Spiders are scary to me. Heck, social media and blogging were (and are) scary to me.

I didn’t throw ice tea on anyone in my social media circles…yet, but I was scared of strangers following me on twitter and Instagram. Was it a form of social phobia? Whatever my hesitation was…it was real to me. I’m over that now.

According to the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), phobias are “a specific fear with an irrational anxiety” and “15 – 20 percent of people experience symptoms of specific phobias over the course of their life.”

If you suffer from a phobia, the DSM-V categorizes it in the five following subtypes:

• Fear of animals
• Fear of natural environment
• Fear of blood/injection/injury
• Fear of situations
• Other fears

Those five categories are quite encompassing. If we were to experience phobias as bloggers, our subtype would more than likely be the fear of situations or other fears.

When I began blogging I had a desire to be anonymous. I had a fear of what people would think. What fun is that?

Here are some phobias we may experience as bloggers:

Grammarphobia = the fear of using poor grammar. (The bloggy police are going to give me a ticket for using that preposition at the end of a sentence…or are they? I can not confirm this is a true phobia but there is a very informative blog.)

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophopia = the fear of long words (that has got to be a joke)

Ideaphobia = the fear of ideas

Logizomechanophobia = fear of computers

Scriptophobia = fear of writing in public (for all the coffee-shop-blog writers as well as real-time twitter and Facebook status updaters…you’ve beat Scriptophobia!)

Verbophobia = fear of words (don’t fear words…they’ll come to you.)

Nomophobia = fear of being out of mobile phone contact (is this the same as the fear of not having wifi? If it is…this is a real fear for me.)

Atelophobia = a fear of imperfection (your imperfections are perfect)

Typophobia* = fear of posting a blog with a typo (Blogging’s a beautiful thing, because you can correct your typos any time {night or day} and then go on with your bad self!)

And for my random fear of the day that has nothing to do with blogging is Omphalophobia = the fear of navels (yes, that is the fear of belly buttons). Why in the world would someone fear this? If you have this fear, tell me about it. I realize it is a real fear. Maybe you know something I don’t know about belly buttons. Do tell because mine is with me 24/7.

Of course there is the Phobophobia. Yes, that is the fear of having a phobia of fear. Now that is scary.

I had a fear of writing this post. That’s called blogpostaphobia*.

As a blogger, do you find yourself fearing something specific? How does a fear manifest for you? Do you experience symptoms such as rapid heart rate, sweating, trembling, worry, or syncope (feeling faint)?

What other blogging/social media phobias would you create and add to the list? Tell us your #BLOGPHOBIA .

*denotes these are fake phobia names. All other phobias were gathered from NAMI or Oxford Dictionaries Blog.