I have a long history of being terrified of things. For whatever reason, for example, as far back as I can remember, I’ve always assumed that I was going to be murdered and/or abducted by aliens and/or mummies. Things are different now, obviously. For example I know that mummies probably don’t come back from the dead to kill people and that aliens aren’t going to mistake our round driveway as a landing pad for their space ship and blow up my house. They are more likely to just watch me through my window and wait until I’m asleep to scare and subsequently experiment and exterminate me.
Back then, however, for whatever reason, I thought I was more likely to be kidnapped and murdered by a person than an alien (I realize now that the opposite is definitely true). If any adult ever acknowledged me in any way it was definitely so that I’d be lured into a false sense of security so that they could tie me up and hack me to pieces in their barn one night.
This barn is within murder van driving distance from my house.
I think it may be the result of watching too many episodes of Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted as a five year old. This wasn’t solely directed towards strangers. Family members also posed a danger to my life. For all I knew, I was bred for the sole purpose of having an easy murder victim.
The earliest memory I have of experiencing near fatal levels of terror was when I was about eight years old. For whatever reason, my parents allowed me to stay up late and watch what I think was the Twilight Zone, but it could have been anything, really. This episode, obviously, combined my two greatest fears: aliens and death by aliens. I distinctly remember a scene where one of the heroes reaches around a corner to find a light switch. Obviously, an alien grabs his hand and pulls him into the dark and that’s really all I know because I’m pretty sure I hid my face until the episode was over. After my mother had sufficiently calmed me down I was told to go brush my teeth and get ready for bed (brushing my teeth at night later became another battle, but that’s another story). After I had washed up, I stood before the dark abyss that was my bedroom, in which there was definitely an alien, weighing my options. I wasn’t going to bother telling my parents because they wouldn’t believe me, so I only had two options. One: walk into my room, turn the light on, and face the alien head on before it ate me, or two: recreate the scene from the show I just watched and reach around the corner and let the alien pull me into the dark and be eaten before I got a chance to see it. Obviously I chose the second option, because if I have one motto, it’s “I would rather just die than have to see the monster or man with the axe first”.
asshole.
I finally worked up the courage to reach around the corner with my eyes shut tight to turn on the light and, obviously, I feel the cold death-grip of the Thing that was going to end my life.
The fact that I didn’t lose control of my bowels is one of my life’s biggest accomplishments. On job applications under “strengths” I’m just going to write “grace under pressure” and link to this blog entry. As I lie on the floor, face frozen in a scream of terror, pants clean, my mother stumbles out of the darkness in tears of laughter trying unsuccessfully to calm me down. The rest of the night is a bit of a blur, but I probably wrote my mother a strongly worded letter asking her not to scare me to death ever again. Proof that strongly worded letters never accomplish anything.
Next time: Tiny gremlin in my closet
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