When I was a wee child, I had a ridiculous amount of irrational fears, but really no more than any other kid. I was scared to death to be in a dark room. I would turn every light in the house on just to walk to the bathroom. It got to a point that my parents wouldn’t let me turn on the lights because it was ridiculous, so I decided to sprint from the living room to the bathroom when I had to go. If I was home alone, I would just hold it until mom or dad got home.
When I would take a shower I would NOT turn my back to the back of the shower. Also, I wouldn’t close my eyes to wash the shampoo out of my hair…I had a system so that I could keep my eyes open the entire time to watch the door in case anyone where to come in. Apparently, when I was a kid I thought I lived in the world’s most unsafe house or something, and that my parents would just let ANYONE waltz in to get me!
What this particular blog is about though is a fear that has actually become a joke with my family over the years. This fear had such an innocent start that it’s almost ridiculous. I was outside looking at the stars one night and I mentioned how one set of stars looked like a “horse figure”. Now, my family was really good at taking normal things and making them scary for me (I know I sound like a pansy but I swear I’m not!). They would do this by just repeating things over and over until it was annoying, and then finally, scary. What added to this is that I have a very overactive imagination, so I would get these very vivid images in my head and end up scaring myself. One example of this is a “horror” movie we saw about cats. This movie was NOT scary by any means…but they continuously meowed and for some reason it became creepy to me. Back to this new constellation I had found, this “horse figure” in the stars and my parents thought it was so funny that they would randomly refer to the horse figure in conversation. This turned into them referring to the horse figure as some monster that was going to come after me (I know my family sounds mean in this story, but I promise that they love me very much and were just teasing me…I was just very easily scared). My family still to this day doesn’t know why the Horse Figure was so scary to me, but I would FLIP out when they started talking about it and I would run out of the room with my ears plugged (I’m seriously laughing as I’m typing this!). The reason it was so scary is that in my mind, I had dreamed up this monstrous horse thing that would come after me if anyone talked about it.
My family finally stopped when I went to my mom privately and asked her very sincerely to stop talking about it, and she promised they’d stop. Throughout the years though, as I got over all of these irrational fears, the Horse Figure would make random appearances in jokes and prods at me. I LOVE the fact that I can look back with my family at all these weird, crazy, irrational things that I had going through my head and laugh about it, and I promise, I’ve grown out of 99.9% of these fears…I’ll let you imagine what I’m still scared of!
What irrational fears did you have when you were younger?
Until next time…God Bless!
-Tyler
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