Emily is Smiling

Day 15: Five funny fears

1.) Sharks.  I have an unnatural fear of sharks.  Why, I'm actually not sure.  I've never even had a real life experience with sharks.  I can watch a horror movie and not feel an ounce of fear.  But if I watch Jaws, I'm up for two weeks with nightmares.  Even a photograph of a shark can cause me to start shaking or stay up half the night.  This is a little embarrassing, but I was going to get a photograph to put to the side of this paragraph, but when I Googled shark pictures, I almost threw up and had to exit out before I could save an image.  I can't bear sharks!  When I was little, I wouldn't swim in pools because I thought, "What if a shark could get inside?"

2.) Deep water.  Again with the water thing.  I don't know what traumatic experience I had as a child that makes me so afraid of the ocean and very deep water.  It freaks me out to the point where I can't even look at a picture of the ocean.  You know that BBC series, "Blue Earth" or something like that?  I can't watch any of those episodes.

3.) Becoming completely paralyzed to the point where I can't communicate with anyone.  I've heard the horror stories.  The whole idea of lying in a bed, unable to even move my eyes, freaks me out.

4.) Going crazy.  Ever since someone told me that you can become schizophrenic after the age of eighteen, I've crossed off the days on my calendar like my eighteen birthday is an execution.  Ahhh, a month from yesterday!  As I've gotten older, my paranoia of this has decreased a lot, but the idea of going crazy still worries me sometimes. :)

5.) Heights.  This is a typical one, so I wasn't sure if I should put it or not.  I'm terrified of heights to the point that I struggle with climbing a step ladder or at times, even crawling into the back of someone's pickup truck.  Yeah, it's bad.  I work on it.  The summer before my freshman year, I decided to face my fear of heights and jump off a 27 foot cliff into deep water. (Two fears in one, heck yeah!)  It didn't work.  I'm still scared.

I know all of these fears are silly, but that's the point of this blog entry, right?  What are some of your worst or silliest or most irrational fears?  What do you do to overcome them?