I’m Terrified of the Ocean, So Why Cant I Look Away?

My phone always knows how to scare me when it’s past 11pm. It’s like a trick to get me to keep scrolling: I find a creepy video and all of a sudden I can’t turn the lights off. If I look away from my screen, the shadows in the corner of my room start to turn into eldritch monsters. 

I think part of it is how easily I get scared in the dark. Almost anything can unsettle me and leave me scurrying to turn on a lamp. Recently, when I’m scrolling through TikTok or Instagram reels late at night, I’ve been seeing the same face everywhere I turn. 

When it looks at me head-on, its eyes are on the side of its face and its mouth is curled up in an awful grin. When it opens its mouth, it looks like its whole head splits horizontally down the middle to reveal sharp, wicked teeth. 

I am, of course, talking about the lead villain in “Happy Feet,” the leopard seal.

It’s a silly fear for someone in southern Canada to have. It’s not like a leopard seal is going to crawl out from under my bed and take a chomp out of my leg while I’m sleeping. However, I do think the same argument can be made about anything that scares us. These Antarctic predators, and any large marine life really, unsettle me. However, I definitely exacerbate the fear with my late night deep dives and rabbit holes. I remember one night where I sat and watched leopard seal videos for at least two hours. It’s got me thinking: why do we become so fixated on the things that scare us?

The ocean is expansive enough that when asking this question, my mind wanders from the predators within it to the environment itself. Cave diving is another fright that has haunted my late night scrolling. Specifically, those weird narrated videos about freak accidents that happen when people are squeezing their bodies through gaps too narrow to fit them far below the ocean’s surface. I never thought I was claustrophobic but watching these videos, paired with my inability to swim, gets my stomach churning in knots. 

It doesn’t make sense to me either. Why would anyone want to undergo all that training and buy all that specialized equipment just to swim into a cave too dark and too narrow to see anything but rocks and debris? I could never do it, but hearing about others doing it is irresistibly compelling. 

I think that might be part of why I fixate on things that scare me so easily. There probably won’t ever be a point in my life where I’m face to face with a leopard seal, and I definitely won’t ever be trying to squeeze myself through a gap the size of an abnormally large snail. A very large part of my engagement with things that frighten me comes from my fascination with things I don’t understand. 

The ocean is unbelievably large: there are areas too deep for us to explore, new species of fish we have still yet to find, and animal behaviours we will likely never understand. It’s definitely scary to linger too long on these things, but I think there’s also a beauty in a forgien ecosystem so close to us that we will probably never know everything about.

That might be part of the reason cave divers become so committed to what they do. Although I still think they’re a little crazy, a part of me can understand them. They’re more hands on, exploratory and risk taking than I am, but at the end of the day, we are both gripped by wanting to understand something that we might not ever fully be able to. 

That’s probably why it’s so hard for me to put my phone down, especially late into the night when I have nothing better to do. I don’t have any Antarctic expeditions or deep-sea explorations planned, but I might treat myself to another video before I close my eyes. 

• mental health
• nature
• phobias
• self-care