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Fatima Hayat realized she was terrified of space after watching a few episodes of Cosmos while growing up and saw, with her own eyes, how “vast, empty, eerie, lonely, and meaningless” the universe is.
“It makes me feel like I have a plastic bag wrapped around my face and I’m suffocating to death,” she told The Daily Beast. “I can’t breathe. I’m claustrophobic, but it is peculiar that space triggers my claustrophobia, when space is vast, open space. Maybe it’s because there’s no air to breathe there. Or maybe because it has no sky and no ground, no end upwards or downwards. It is just dark, still, lifeless and… cruel.”
Hayat, a 26-year old economic and social development consultant for the government of Pakistan, said that her fear is so bad that she’s even had panic attacks thinking about traveling through the vast expanse of space alone. “I feel dizzy and my heart beat rises. I sometimes get cold sweats, palpitations, and nausea.”
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