Back to Spring 2025

Things That Don’t Kill Us

Julie Pearson | Nonfiction, Spring 2025

When I was a kid, I was acutely aware that I could die at any moment. I didn’t experience an early tragedy, deaths in the family, not even a pet. I was just highly suggestible, with an active imagination. I made it my mission to pinpoint the absolute worst thing that could happen at any time, and assumed that it would happen, no question. After fire safety day at school, I’d lay awake at night waiting for the moment I’d begin to smell smoke (and did you know smoke can be just as dangerous as fire? I did). When the monthly tornado test siren went off, I was sure this would be the time when a tornado actually hit, right when nobody was taking the siren seriously. I’d think of every possible way I could drown in three inches of water (did you know that’s all it takes to drown a small child? I did). Once, on the way to the mall with my family when I was six, our car got gently rear-ended on a residential street. Nothing really happened to us, but I started sobbing because “car accidents kill people.” I later assumed we’d been very lucky to escape with our lives, and I imagined all the other car accidents we could have gotten into and how it would feel to die that way.

My mom, for her part, wouldn’t let me walk down hardwood stairs in socks just in case I slipped, and sent a car seat along every time I got a ride with a friend’s parents until I was about eight years old. She overcooked meat to the point that I still can’t eat steak, and I never got to lick the spoon when she made cookies in case there was salmonella in the raw eggs. But to her, my neuroses were a total mystery: where did they come from? Why was I this way? The problem was that none of our anxieties matched up, and she was only interested in taking hers seriously. She had no patience for my week of nightmares after learning that the movie Armageddon existed, which I assumed greatly increased the chances of a similar doomsday scenario happening here on Earth.

But that all paled in comparison to the moment I learned about carbon monoxide. I was seven. My teacher referenced it casually to the whole class of second graders. When we were confused, she clarified: it’s a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that can kill you before you’ve even realized you’ve breathed it in.

I came home and spent the whole night going on about “the silent killer.” How “it could be in the air right now!” and “we might all die!” I sounded like a promo for a local news segment. My mom said the same thing she said every time I worried about something, “Julie, you’re fine.” I knew that exasperated phrase was supposed to reassure me enough to stop talking about it, so I did. But I kept panicking on my own, quietly.

About a week later, in an astronomically unlikely turn of events, my grandparents had carbon monoxide in their house. They were fine, but I assumed this meant carbon monoxide was extremely common. I mean, I had proof! I had only just learned of it and now it had happened to someone I knew. The incident also inspired my parents to buy a carbon monoxide detector for the house, this clunky white brick that plugged into the wall. They put it in the doorway to their bedroom, and I loved it. It displayed a comforting, digital red zero to show us we were safe from the invisible monster that could take our lives without even a whisper.

There were a lot of things in my world that I didn’t understand: why my mom was convinced that my group of friends was “mean,” why she seemed so concerned that I didn’t have enough friends in the first place, why there seemed to be so many endless rules about what and who was safe. But the detector communicated clearly. I loved that I could secretly check this little meter and be told that everything was okay without anyone else knowing. 

At least at first. Because once we got the detector, it didn’t make me any less anxious. Because then, it felt like if we needed a special detector for it, it must be dangerous...and imminent. This thing was like Chekhov’s gun to me—now that we had it, I knew at some point it had to go off. Checking it once a day turned into checking it every time I walked past, which turned into sneaking into my parents’ room and checking it multiple times a night. I never quite believed that the number actually said zero, so I’d stare at it, squinting, until I was totally sure. Then I’d walk away and be convinced that I’d read it wrong—I’d think it said eight instead of zero—so I’d have to go back and check again. Then I’d start to wonder if I had a brain tumor and my blurred vision was a symptom of that, so I’d squint harder to convince myself that my vision was okay. After a while, I was checking the carbon monoxide detector six, seven, eight, fifteen times a day. Somehow, throughout this whole thing, nobody thought to tell me much of anything about carbon monoxide poisoning. For example: it has symptoms. And degrees of severity. You don’t necessarily just drop dead in the middle of dinner like a car wash windsock.

Later I’d learn that sometimes people see ghosts in their house for months before learning that, actually, it was caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. I don’t know if that would have been comforting at the time, but I do know that I didn’t hear those stories until much later. Instead, one day, without so much as an explanation, I was delivered to a therapist.

Her name was Carol and she was a middle-aged lady with short blonde hair and lots of toys in her office. I started going to see her once a week, being pulled out of school on Wednesday afternoons. We’d talk, and she would instruct me to play with the toys. A lot of them were heavily oriented toward family issues—mom dolls, dad dolls, baby dolls. A couple dollhouses. I didn’t really know what to do with them—I wasn’t yet aware of the ways my family made me feel unsafe.I must have acted out all the little dolls dying in their sleep. It was probably riveting theatre for Carol.

I didn’t feel any particular way about going to therapy, but I understood—almost by birthright of being midwestern—that it was important that nobody else knew about it. Nobody should find out that I was seeing a therapist. I had bad teeth, and I think my mom told the school I was going to orthodontist appointments. But instead, we drove to this nondescript building next to a Burger King and never spoke a word about what happened in there.

After months of seeing Carol the Child Psychologist, it was still not working. I was just as afraid. I’m sure everyone was very annoyed by all the progress I wasn’t making. And then one day, out of nowhere, and maybe out of exasperation, she said to me, “You know, cars emit carbon monoxide, and they drive around us all the time.” I hadn’t thought of that. “If cars are always around us, then aren’t we breathing in carbon monoxide every day?”

Time stopped. I couldn’t believe I’d overlooked something so obvious. At that moment, I realized she was right. The things that kill us are all around us, intermingling with our world and, often, even serving a purpose. I realized that we must coexist with our fears. That everything in the world isn’t all or nothing, fear or courage, danger or safety. A switch flipped, and I knew everything would be okay.

No, obviously that didn’t happen. Her assertion terrified me. It put me in a tricky position. How was I supposed to face a world where I couldn’t breathe anymore? I tried for a few days - every time it crossed my mind, I’d try to hold my breath, so I wasn’t letting any of the deadly toxin in.

But this was unsustainable. I had to keep breathing, there was no way around it. And over time, Carol’s diabolical tactic worked. This particular fear drifted away, just in time for anti-drug education to start (and did you know sometimes kids in the 60’s were given LSD when they thought it was candy? I did!). I stopped seeing Carol, and while all my other fears—and a growing number of social anxieties—remained intact and ignored, I never really thought about carbon monoxide again.

In fact, her method worked so well that I don’t really believe carbon monoxide exists anymore. It’s a monster I’ve banished from under the bed. A gothic German bedtime story told to children to scare them. When I moved into my first apartment, my mom bought me a detector of my own (because now she believes it’s real). I humored her and carried it from place to place for a long time. A few years later, I was falling asleep one night and it started beeping. It was loud and jarring. I figured the batteries were dying, so I pulled them out and went right back to sleep. It didn’t even register to me until a couple weeks later, I noticed the batteries sitting next to the alarm and realized...I was still alive.

________________________________________________________________________

Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?

“If I have an origin story, this is it: a neatly contained microcosm that sets up a lifetime of anxiety. I felt like such an outlier, a strange case back when I was going through this. As I've told and read this story at comedy shows over the last few years, someone always comes up to me afterwards and tells me about a hyper-specific childhood fear they had, which has offered me more healing than Carol ever did (sorry Carol, you were great). If I'm leaving something behind, I would like it to be the knowledge that none of us were alone in this.”

Julie Pearson is a writer, director, and comedian whose work has been featured on Reductress, Spotify Original Podcasts, the Roku Channel and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as on her Substack, Minor Kitchen Injuries. For the last three years, she has co-hosted The Non-Fiction Show, a live lit variety show in Los Angeles where she reads her work monthly.