what things (not sensory) severely upset you as a child?

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For me, I remember reading Little Women and there was a poem about a lost cat that got replaced and it made me so incredibly upset for days to the point my parents were pretty concerned.

Dogs and to some extent cats (at least my own cat) were my special interest as a child

My parents lying and/or breaking their promises to me.

Being excluded. Losing things. Changes.

I remember at nursery we were read the book Dogger by Shirley Hughes, about a boy who loses his toy dog and then finds him for sale at a charity sale, but by the time he gets his parents to come with money someone else has bought him. I remember two members of staff explaining to me, in floods of tears, that it was OK because he got Dogger back when his sister traded him for a prize she had won. I couldn’t explain at the time. Looking back I think it was the combination of the initial loss and the total vulnerability and lack of agency that the boy had. He wasn’t in control of Dogger.

I remember feeling really sad whenever we sung the song Puff The Magic Dragon, to the point where I didn't want to sing it. It just made me feel depressed.

I have two given names, one starts with 'S', the other with 'R'.

When I was in school, it upset me that other kids called me with the name with 'S'. They were my classmates for years, and for years they called me 'R', and suddenly they started to call me 'S'.

Then they started to mimic me "It's not 'S', it's 'R'" —that's what I used to say when they called me 'S'.

'S' is my first given name, 'R' is the second. My family call me 'R', so that's the reason I preferred 'R'.
Now as an adult, I realized that the kids used to call me 'S' because they liked to see me angry.

I wasn't too keen on being whipped with a leather belt to be honest

For me it was sharks, vampires and nuclear war. I think because those things were in films (Jaws, Hammer House of Horror) and/or on the news (nuclear war).

As a child, my husband was terrified of spontaneously combusting.

As a child, my mum was afraid of catching leprosy.

I think it depends what is on the news or what is talked about when you're a child.

Being called fatty, fatso, tubby and the like.

This is going to sound incredibly silly, but the Numberjacks.

For those unaware, it was a children's TV show aimed at teaching kids about numbers. The animation was stilted. It had these vibrant sentient numbers with bizarrely detailed eyes for an otherwise cartoonish design. It just looked wrong and made me feel uncomfortable.

Also, it was very much a villain of the week type of show. The villains weren't scary but they were... I don't know, off putting? I remember when I was a child I felt disturbed. It would often ruin my appetite so I stopped watching it. Too much slime on food and such. At least I think, it's odd - I remember it disturbing me but I barely remember what happened in the show at all.





Seems silly now. I have to wonder what on Earth the pitch meetings were like for new characters on this show.

A lot of things.
Too many things. I cannot begin where.
From TV shows, to concepts -- sharing, expectations, someone having more or less, etc...

Even with how many clothes my mom buys -- doesn't matter whose.
Anyone in the house buying expensive stuff, anyone wasting stuff. And so forth.

Many of which are scenarios and circumstances.
Other specific parts are practically buried elsewhere that I might as well deny it because it's 'inappropriate'.

And that itself upsets me then and upsets me still.

I already hated the things I couldn't understand well.
At some point I destroyed something simply because it 'felt wrong'.
My earliest memories of doing so was even before entering elementary.

I already hate masking before I knew it's called masking. I already hated conformity and anti-conformity. I already hate the ideas of business and money talks.


Heck even as a child I'm already upset with everyone that registers as 'typical people'.
Basically, the fact that I'm 'alone' that I'm 'in their territory'.
That this is 'their world', not 'mine' and those who are 'like me'.

To a point that all the sudden, as a child, I might as well just woke up one day and start hating everyone including my mom and sister for no apparent reason.

Feeling that they all betrayed me, that they're all liars and won't ever believe me because they're 'siding' with the 'enemy'.
THEN 'realizing' it's not like they betrayed anyone to begin with, they're were never on my side from the very start.


In fact even to this day, I never told anyone about it.

Imagine that, at age of 8, when I realized that I'm different from everyone else -- that's the only part of the story I kept telling -- then all that all that mistrust, all that paranoia and suspicion...

All that anger and pain happened, which I hadn't ever told anyone yet. A time where I don't even know what the name of autism even was...

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Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

My biggest stressors as a child involved my mother's addictions and all the crap that came along with that stuff. My house was a real sh** show. Childhood not great.

At my school we were shown a public information film called "Apaches". This film is notorious now for messing up children. It's on YouTube if you care to watch it, I'm not going to link to it.

The idea was to scare children into not messing around on farms.

Basically the film follows five children as they play on a farm. One by one they die in gruesome accidents. One is crushed by a tractor. One drowns in a slurry pit. One dies screaming in agony having drunk some chemical or other - that one haunted me for years.

But what was really weird is that after each death there's a tragic little vignette of life after the death, like their parents sadly putting away their dead childs clothes. Then back to play on the farm!

Anyway, we'd have been 6 or 7 when we were shown this monstrous piece of filmmaking. Some of its imagery is just burned into my brain.

It blows my mind that some of you had to watch things like that in school. How awful. Sorry you were forced to deal with that. Bloody hell. My school just made us watch boring stuff. It used to irritate the bunch of us back then, but now I have a newfound appreciation for those boring things.