What are you afraid of and, as far as you can describe it, why?
For me, it’s octopodes (and squid and cuttlefish, but mainly octopodes). They’re just so damn alien. Their closest relatives are barely-living lumps of slime like oysters, but they’re still scary smart; much smarter than a mollusc has any right to be. They have hypnotic eyes. They have slithery, boneless arms with freaking suckers, so you’ll never ever get them off you once they’ve taken hold. They have sharp beaks that gnaw relentlessly on your leg as you desperately try to rip them off, which you can’t, because of their strength and the aforementioned suckers. They lurk in dark caves, vicious eyes scanning, waiting to attack you. Also, they’re evil. Everything about them is just wrong. They shouldn’t exist.
Apparently, there’s a Hawaiian creation myth stating that the octopus is the sole survivor from the previous universe. I have no trouble buying that.
One man’s phobia is another woman’s treasure, I suppose. I absolutely adore the type of creature you describe here. As a matter of fact, I’m currently curled up with my octopus blanket and a giant stuffed octopus (sheer coincidence, I assure you.)
My phobia is mold and spoiled food. These things invoke terror and loathing. I am usually too afraid to clean out the refrigerator for fear of what I’ll find there. When I don’t have a choice I’ll just close my eyes, grab random things and throw them away without looking at them.
It’s difficult to say why I have this phobia. Part of it might be that I’m allergic to mold – its presence makes my lungs hack, and I’m allergic to penicillin which is a fungi-based medicine. Another reason is I guess that I am a very empathic and sensitive person, with a vivid imagination, so any time I see spoiled food I can immediately ‘‘imagine’’ what it’d be like to eat it. Which is of course, disgusting.
The strange thing is, that in some abstract theoretical way, I like octopodes. They’re interesting. I like reading about them, looking at them in pictures or through glass, but if I were to ever encounter one with no barrier between us, I actually believe my heart might stop from terror. If it didn’t, I’d wish it did.
Squalor is also one of mine. The thought of walking into a home that encrusted in filth gives me anxiety, much less living in one.
Deep water, any water really where I cannot see the bottom and sides clearly at all times. (i.e. anything that isn’t a man made pool). I have been in lakes, creeks, even the white river, well that one was an accident… I hate sand too, and creepy crawly things in the sand, and fish…
I am a land dweller for sure, perhaps part hobbit from the Shire? I loathe boats, the Sea frightens me.
I also cannot sit down to take a bath. I will not sit my naked rear on any tub. Not even one that I scrubbed myself. I shower only, and don’t touch the curtain or the walls with anything but my hands.
Sock monkeys. They creep me out. I’m not sure why.
Sunken ships. I do not like scuba diving on them. It just feels wrong on a fundamental level. They’re supposed to be on top of water, not under it, and filled with it. I get the willies if I am near one, and do NOT like to enter them. Underwater caves don’t bother me that way, though. They can be quite interesting.
I don’t know if I would call these phobias per se, as it’s not like I’m afraid of them, I just really dislike spiders & clusters of tiny holes (trypophobia.)
The spiders thing is weird though, it depends on the size of the spider. Really really tiny ones (like smaller a millimeter) don’t bother me, and neither do tarantulas. But it’s the middle-sized ones that I hate. Jumping spiders & wolf spiders especially. Maybe because they move really fast and I can imagine them scurrying up my arm too fast for me to squish them or something, where as a tarantula can be picked up and held in place. (Not to say that I wouldn’t be freaked out by a tarantula-sized spider suddenly appearing in my apartment, but I don’t think I would have any trouble actually holding one like in a zoo or something.)
Heights. I could get up on the roof of my two story house because it’s a two part trip but I could not get close enough to the edge to clean the eaves troughs (do Americans call these gutters?) In the third balcony of a concert hall, I feel like I might lift out of my seat and hover over the edge.
But that’s common and boring. When I was a child I was afraid of buttons. The thought of touching a button made me cringe. I’m over that now - just grew out of it. Or at least I thought I did until I got a pair of underwear with buttons on it. Yuck!
I have a phobia of falling down in public. Sometimes, when I’m grocery shopping and I’m pushing the cart, I concentrate so intensely on placing one foot in front of the other that my legs lose feeling and I have to look down to see if I’m walking.
I know this isn’t the official name* - because I made this one up - but it’s how I think of it:
Crowdrophobia.
More than a half dozen people in a room sized area gets me looking for the exits. Actually walking into something like a mall or large shopping center during the holidays or something like a movie theater just is not an option for me. And it’s the primary reason that I keep moving to more and more rural areas. I hate crowds.
Crowds of people adopt Large Herd Behavior and large herds tend to stampede at the slightest provocation.
Having experienced this behavior of crowds first hand, I’m not at all certain that this meets the “unreasonable” part of the definition of the word phobia.
I am certain that I ain’t gettin’ into a mess like that ever again.
Lucy
*Officially, it appears you can take your pick: Crowds or mobs- Enochlophobia, Demophobia or Ochlophobia - I can’t seem to remember any of those (and one of them sounds like I’m afraid to watch a Kirby vacuum cleaner demonstration) so I’ll stick to my own label.
Now, I can look at a light bulb fine. The image of a light bulb doesn’t bother me. But I have trouble handling them. I get nervous. Don’t ask me to change one. I can’t do it. I can barely stand to be in the room when Husband changes bulbs, and on more than one occasion have fled the room because I’m convinced the damn thing will shatter in his hand.
I’ve never seen nor known anyone who’s had a light bulb shatter in their hand. I’m just terrified of it.
And leeches. And heights. They’re my three biggest phobias.
I’m a needle-phobe. If I have to get blood drawn or get a shot, I take off my glasses and turn my head as far as it will go the other way. About 1 time out of 2, my neck will hurt for a few days afterward, from trying to turn it farther than it will go. I also tend to tear up, and my legs feel kind of shaky afterward. I marvel at people who can go to get an allergy or flu shot on their lunch hour and then go back to work. I’m very shaken up for a few hours after anything involving a needle, and then a few hours later when the adrenalin wears off, I crash hard. I think my needle-phobia is genetic. My dad and my sister both faint at the sight of their own blood.
I can’t watch movies with anything gory in them, either. I watched Master and Commander, and all I remember is the scene where the doctor was doing surgery on himself. I didn’t look at the screen during that scene (Mr. Neville had to tell me when it was safe to look), but just hearing it and knowing what was happening was enough to make me feel like I was literally going to throw up.
I’m afraid of electric shocks. I prefer not to be in the same room if anyone is doing any kind of electrical work. In fact, I wish they’d keep a bigger distance from me. If they were in Philadelphia, that would be a nice safe distance.
I’m afraid of fire in the kitchen (flambes or even a brief bit of flame when you put something in a pan), and also of the hissing sound you get when you put something into an already-hot pan. I will back out of the kitchen if anyone does something involving those things. I would prefer that no one closer than Philadelphia do those things, either.
Balloons make me nervous, because the sound they make when they pop scares me.
Just thinking about their wrinkled, shiny, slithery unshapen bodies gives me the shivers, for real. The way they cling to objects, or to the ground, they act like they want to be parasites, sucking vital fluid from a host. Wannabe leeches, perhaps. But they aren’t. They exist without purpose, and when you aren’t paying attention, they just *appear, in the middle of the path you’re walking on. Waiting.
Earthworms take a close second place. Vile things. Without clear form, something that can be so large or so small yet behave identically is just not natural. Horrid, horrid, horrid. Even when dead, squashed and dried out on concrete, they retain something with a power to repel, their anti-soul, perhaps, which lives with them always.
This doesn’t really qualify as a phobia according to the dictionary definition because I know exactly where it comes from.
Fear of any type of lotion coming in contact with my face, this used to be a problem because I refused to apply sunblock no matter how red my face would get while boating. Since they came out with aerosol sunblock life is good again.
You probably have guessed why I hate lotion. I had horrible, bordering on disgusting acne beginning at age thirteen and showed no sign of subsiding until around age twenty. Hell, I still get the occasional zit in my mid forties. And it doesn’t matter if the bottle screams in large block letters that it is non-greasy, I. Don’t. Care.
What’s up with eels? Eels, why don’t you have limbs? Are you a snake or a fish? And the teeth … Did you know that there are eels that can live out of a water when their river or whatever dries up, and then flop themselves a fairly hefty distance to another body of water? That is just wrong. Can you imagine the horror of finding yourself between an eel and his destination? It would flop on you and touch you with its limbless, toothy, flopiness. I’m pretty sure that once an eel touches you, you can never get completely clean of the eel contamination. Gah.