fears throughout your life that were considered odd

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When I was a child, there was a big multi-railway crossing that my family sometimes crossed. When the bars were coming down to block the traffic, it only made one burp-like sound and no other continuous sound. That silence with the bars down felt very ominous and I always found it very scary. I'm still generally uncomfortable with railway crossings. I always kind of think of gory death around there.

Another one I just remembered: We lived a mile or two from an active military base when I was a kid, and every now and then, we'd hear the loud roar of planes taking off, landing, or passing overhead. I remember I would hide under a coffee table sometimes when one of the jets would fly over.

I dislike popping balloons, too. But I hated fire drills when I was in grade school. HATED. I was always on edge when I heard chatter that we were going to have one go around the classroom because the sudden, shrill sound of the alarm would always startle me.

I can relate to your dislike of phones, talking to strangers, and confrontation, too.


The worst railroad crossing I could think of is a four-track crossing under a freeway in a neighboring city to where I live. When I was a kid, my mom would take the crossing really slowly: The railroad used large wood planks to "pave" the crossing, and my mom didn't want to throw her car's wheels out of alignment. It made me nervous as it was, but one day, the gates started coming down while we were crossing the tracks and I started freaking out. It took me a while to before I could handle this particular crossing without panicking.

I am afraid of most insects and arachnids, though I think that's a pretty common fear. I am somewhat uncomfortable around clowns and heights.

My strange fears would be:

sudden loud and/or unexpected noises, so balloons (vacuum cleaners and toasters as well, when I was a kid)

large land birds (was chased by a farm turkey when I was a kid)

water that I can't see through (I will get in it, but not over my head and I am out if I see or feel anything move)

gravity disappearing. Probably my strangest fear. Sometimes I feel a little faint just by looking straight up into the sky. I think it started when I attempted to go indoor sky-diving when I was a preteen. Let's just say it did NOT go well. I wouldn't make it as an astronaut, for sure.

I also hate my food juices touching, as well as drinking after people. Those might be fears, I'm not sure. I just have... peculiarities when it comes to food and germs.

I was afraid of both heights and depths, cats, anything that flaps it's wings, lifts (elevators), crowds, talking to anyone I don't know well(still have that one), embarrassment (both mine and others), and so on. I have managed to bring most of these under control now, but some still make me uneasy.

when i was younger, i had many hypochondriacal paranoia's.
i realized when i was little, that many of the vital processes that enabled my existence were not under my conscious control.
i conceived of breathing and blinking and swallowing etc as functions that were ostensibly proceeding under the control of my semi conscious autopilot, but if my autopilot malfunctioned for any reason, i could take manual control of these functions until the fault was found and fixed.

i think i was about 8 when i realized that my heart beat was completely outside my conscious control, and i did not trust my internal mechanism (biological autopilot) to handle the task of beating my heart without my ability to take manual control if necessary. i worried that if i had a malfunction in my internal system that controlled my heart beat, i would be helpless to consciously influence the situation in any way. i do not like to hand over complete control of my destiny to any unalterable eventuality.

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when i was about 10, i had the reverse paranoia that if my autopilot for breathing and blinking and swallowing (and the rest) became permanently disabled, then i would have the lifelong chore of manually breathing, and having to pay attention every second as to when i needed to breathe again. if i breathe too fast i wall hyperventilate , and if i breathe too slow i will become hypoxic, and without the internal carbon dioxide saturation sense, i would not be able to work out how fast to breathe.

the reason that people starve for a breath (when they do) is not because of oxygen hunger, but because of carbon dioxide saturation in the blood.
there is a sense of "suffocation" if carbon dioxide levels in the blood stream become too high, and it is an expulsive instinct that one has, that precipitates the cycle of respiration.

what if i did not have the sense of CO2 saturation? how would i know how to work out how much i should breathe?

while i was terrified about my reliance on my uncontrollable autopilot, i was also terrified about the possibility that if i had complete control over all my bodily processes, i would be dead within 1 minute.
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the older i get, the less terrified of being "dead" i feel. but the actual moment of my death still remains a very worrying idea all throughout my life. i have not much concern as to whether i will still be conscious after i molt my "mortal coil", but the step into death must be quite severe.

i have experienced many severe physical experiences (no more than anyone else though), and whilst i found them outrageously unsavory, i nonetheless was not fatally injured by any of them, so the physical experience that results in my death i expect to be the worst feeling i ever had.

i am not scared of being dead. i am only scared of dying. losing my grip on my life when my strength is too low to hold on to my failing health will probably inspire one last resurgence of effort from me not to lose my grip, and since that will deplete me completely of energy, i will have to let go, and that does not scare me any more. as long as i spend all i have to grip onto my future, i have done all i can, and i dread the day i die, but that is the last sensation i will ever have, and i can sleep uninterrupted forever.
forever is too long. i am sure i will become restless to wake up if i was asleep forever.

i am not old enough to contemplate death to any paralyzing degree, so that is all i have to say in this post.

i was not alive forever before i was born, and the same situation is the case after i die. i do not exist because the duration of my life is infinitely insignificant when divided into the timespan of "forever"

This is interesting! I have often felt like I "needed to breathe", usually if I've been very busy so am likely breathing shallowly. I had a scary experience about a year ago where I started hyperventilating -- the beginnings of a severe panic attack -- and then began dry heaving. I was told by a nurse neighbor that my body and brain were reacting to a lack of oxygen. I guess could also mean too much carbon dioxide, in that I remember breathing in and then FORCEFULLY breathing out. I thought my lungs were full. It makes sense that what I might have really been doing was trying to clear my system of carbon dioxide. I got so bad that I ended up in the ER where they injected me with what seemed to be a turkey baster of Ativan. Scared my poor mother to death..

unfortunately, i can not find any information to reinforce what you quoted that i said.
i distinctly remember a doctor telling me that it was carbon dioxide saturation in the blood that caused "air hunger". today i searched for information to fortify what i said last night and i failed to find any.
i wonder. i have read that people who become hypoxic (for example pilots in the cockpit of a plane that has suffered a decompression event at altitudes above 12,000 ft) do not feel like they are suffocating, but they become disoriented and even stuporously euphoric as their oxygen levels decrease.
since they are still able to expel the carbon dioxide from their lungs, they do not "crave air" as it were.


i am sorry that your mother died. i do not know what a turkey baster is. i expect it is cooking utensil in which to cook turkeys, but turkeys have never really been popular in australia. i can understand why. they are dry and tasteless.

Noise, loud toilets, hand dryers, spiders and signs of disfiguring disease are things, I share with many people.
More odd: At age 4, - a window knob. I thought it would grow and overwhelm me in the dark.

Last edited by Jensen on 15 Dec 2013, 1:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Crawlspaces. They freak me out.

When I started looking at this thread I was like "bah I don't have anything worthy of mentioning, but then I hit Webalina's post and realized "um, yeah, I do.."
Some of the stuff in her list applies to me as well.
The two big ones are
Calling people I don't know, or calling companies or about things like identification card renewals, etc.
Initiating a date/I too have only ever dated through people who got to know me socially in a workplace setting who asked ME out.

When I was younger, I had the biggest fear of the aliens on Sesame Street. I even had trouble going to sleep for about a year because I imagined them outside my window every night. It got to the point where I started to believe that if I hid behind the couch when they came on the TV, I would be safe... they wouldn't find me. To this day I can't think of them without a bit of a chill, and I do NOT, repeat DO NOT ever face my bed towards a window.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhKhGyUnc2E << shudder >>

I had a fear of blowing my nose up until a couple of years ago.

I have fears that I can't identify.

My mom didn't really die...she was just terrified that I was going to that night. And a turkey baster is a large syringe -- a plastic tube about 10 inches long with a squeeze bulb on the end. It's used for drawing up juices from the pan to squirt back over the turkey for moistening (yes, they can be dry if they're not cooked properly). I used that as a joking exaggerated reference to how much medication I needed to stop the huge panic attack I was having.

It's OK if you can't confirm the info about carbon dioxide saturation. It still makes sense to me, based on what my nurse friend told me.

Thunder, lightning, the wooooo-ing sound that powerful gusts of wind made against my bedroom windows in my childhood house. Having to touch cigarette butts. Lucille the opera-singing orange on Sesame Street. Spiders. my food being "contaminated" by germs or bugs.

I was also afraid of the older boys across the street who liked to come over and play too rough with me...which was a fear that my mom thought was odd, but I thought my fear of those boys was perfectly justified, as it would be if I were the parent of a little girl myself, and boys like that were allowed to run loose.

WOW....odd that your mother WOULDN'T find this a problem. You'd think she'd be a little more protective of her little girl. But then again, my mother had a boyfriend years ago who molested me (I was 16), and when I told her, she accused me of lying and trying to break them up. So you never know...

It could well be, but I'd always expected post-traumatic stress of any degree to be more severe. Mentally I was very upset as it happened; beside the physical pain there was a strange sense I'd let myself down, like I'd opened an envelope with my A-level results in and seen all my results were two grades lower than I'd hoped. That feeling seemingly overpowered the actual dread of it happening again, although it does cross my mind a few times a day.

I would expect a considerable case of post-traumatic stress to make me physically react to the triggers, be it anywhere from shutting my eyes and gritting my teeth to getting a bit teary, or even running out of the room screaming. I don't have the experience to know though!