Bit of a different blog post than I’d usually write but this came to me while I was struggling to sleep with a cold last week and I thought that while I’m in the mood to blog nursing a bottle of Brothers I’d post it.
Fears. We all have them. Some of them logical and some not so. My biggest fear has always been wasps. I’m terrified of them. Even looking at pictures of them makes me twitchy. I start to wonder if perhaps there is one in the room with me already. If I’ve spotted one I tend to have a staring competition with it until its deemed too far away to hurt me. If it comes towards me I squeak and run away. It causes people great amusement (usually everyone BUT me, I’m too busy being scared and then embarrassed). I hugely dislike people telling me that I’m being silly and that the wasp won’t hurt me, one because thats not always true and two because I KNOW I’m over reacting, they don’t need to tell me. I’m trying to get better with this by working on my garden, we’re planting flower seeds soon.
Stairs cause me a bit of worry sometimes too. Stairs and escalators. Not all of them, most I’m fine with, but every now and then I’ll encounter a staircase that makes me feel very very anxious as I’m climbing it. I’m terrified I’m gonna slip and fall down it. There is a staircase in town which I really struggle to walk up because I spend the whole time thinking I’m about to die. With escalators it tends to more be a fear if I can’t hold on to the side that I’m gonna fall and because of the constant upwards motion I’ll keep falling. If I can hold on then I’m fine, but occasionally I have too much shopping to do this. I have no idea how people manage to run on the escalators in London Underground- maybe once you’re THAT desperate to shave a few seconds off your commute time you don’t notice.
I also have a rather stranger fear, although fear is not the right word for it, more a disgust and it’s called trypophobia. It’s a phobia of holes, more specifically random holes close together, usually in organic matter. I’m not scared of them as such, I won’t run screaming if I see them but I get huge feelings of disgust. Certain images (which I won’t divulge, you can go and look for yourself) make me feel really nauseous. My skin crawls, I feel hot and cold and I can’t help but picture the holes in my skin. It’s usually in my arms. One image made me feel so bad that I couldn’t get it out of my head for days. I really can’t explain WHAT causes me to find them so repulsive or WHY I instantly picture them as having been eaten into me but I do, as do a surprisingly large amount of other people it seems.
This last one is a bit more jokey- I think I have a fear of not having enough to do when I’m out of the house. Yes, it’s not really a fear but I ALWAYS seem to have at least two things in my bag to do, even though half the time I don’t use them! The worst was when I was a teenager and going on a trip to the seaside- I would pack books, music, drawing stuff, games, all sorts for the journey and then not use any of it because I always got travel sick (which still happens now :< )
What about the rest of you? Any weird fears and phobias you’d like to share? Are you a fellow hole sufferer? Or do you think I’m possibly crazy? Comment to let me know