The other day after returning from lunch, we were all walking (read: very slowly) back to our offices to resume our normal workday, when somehow (the rabbit trails we chase are impressive), the topic of getting sick came up.
It probably came up because currently there is all manner of viruses floating around and we’re all terrified of being the next victim, but anyway, I readily admitted to the fact that vomiting is one of my biggest fears.
The rule here at LPM is if you are sick: STAY HOME. Thank you very much. We love you, but we don’t love your germs.
I won’t go into detail on here out of respect for the fact that some of you might be catching up on the blog during your lunch break, but needless to say, there is nothing worse in my book than getting a stomach virus that produces this kind of reaction.
Lord help me if I end up being one of those that suffers from you-know-what during pregnancy. Speaking of that, I’m going to start asking the Lord to have a little grace on me in that area when that time comes. I’m believing God.
Anyway, once I admitted to that bizarre fear, she who will remain nameless, admitted another strange fear that may or may not have involved a parking lot.
I let she who will remain nameless expand on that if she wants.
We go so tickled that I immediately thought of how quirky we all were and then I thought of y’all. For some reason I have this feeling that if I asked you what your most bizarre fear was, you would deliver.
So, spill it.
Now, I realize we all have legitimate fears, but if you have something out of this world weird, we want to know.
You are in good company.
Oh, and for the record, the fear of vomiting has a term. (Could this post be any less girly? Laughing. Sorry, y’all. Just being real.)
It’s called Emetophobia.
Boom.
You’re welcome.
Had to think on this for a while because God has had me on a Fear Conquering journey these last seven years.
I guess the strangest fear I’ve had is of finding wild animals in my house.
As a teen I was traumatized when finding possum… Yes the Opossum type of possum in various places, playing possum, in my childhood home. I found one sitting among the stuffed animals I kept on my console television in my room as a teen. I returned home from a night out with friends to a beady-eyed, course-haired possum sitting quietly among the other creatures in my room. I awoke my father frantic and he handily grabbed that possum by the tail and tossed it out the front door lasso style.
My second encounter landed when I opened the pantry to get serial. There beside our Wheaties box was a baby possum. And a few days later, I found one trapped in the bathtub. Soaking wet no less as I opened the frosted glass door to step in for a shower. YEP! Traumatized.
Its been 8 or 9 years since we found baby-baby possums (tiny things) in our laundry room. And I only caught a glimpse of their momma running back to the drain door that opened to our crawl space beneath the house in our back bathroom that same day.
We spent months being terrorized by these possums and their friends, squirrels, who found their way up into our walls and underneath our bathtubs. I swear it sounded like we had large hairy monsters living under our house – they would claw at the iron bottom of the tub below the house and if you knocked on the wall they would bounce off the ancient plumbing in the wall trying to escape.
The straw that broke the camel’s back… I walked into my kitchen to cook dinner and found long grayish black hairs sticking about four inches through the vent in my vent-a-hood. My husband’s solution was to DUCT-TAPE the critter in the vent. The next day my teen daughter arrived home from school and called me at work. “There is a black nose sticking out of the vent-a-hood sniffing around.” The critter gnawed its way through the vent and tape. Her final statement on the matter. “I shut the door to the kitchen and turned up the television.”
After a trip to Cabela’s to purchase a large Varmint Trap – my husband and son lured the creature that I swore was a raccoon into the trap with peanut butter. They released him back to the wild. My vent-a-hood did not fair so well – the screen was destroyed and the squirrel had eaten through the wires to the fan. Thank goodness my husband’s stock in trade is Cable Splicer. He fixed it right up.
My crazy fear is finding these type of wild varmint critters in my house. TRUE. Nothing compared to my daughter’s fear of spiders… She can’t even see a fake one or a pic of one in a book or on television. She freaks out – I mean FREAKS out.
So there it is — outing the family on Living Proof Blog.
Ready for it… Wood. Wooden spoons, benches, tables… I can not make myself touch wood. If its stained and glossy it’s ok but anything close to “rough” just sends chills down my back.
Clowns give me the creeps!
Sandi-I’m a professional clown! We’re not ALL that creepy!!! Hahahahahaha
I have a tremendous fear of those little bitty lizards that run around all over the place here in South Florida. I know they run away from me as soon as I step near them but my mind automatically sees a giant 10ft. monster lizard!
We live out in the country and I often go for a run out in the fields behind our house (on the tractor roads). Kind of red neck, but it’s the only place for me that I can go early in the morning! lol! I have this fear that something will happen to me on my run, I’ll be stuck out in that field and my husband won’t miss me until he can’t find something or gets hungry!
Lindsee,
Your post is so funny because I have the same fear as you! Just so you know, God did protect me from morning sickness. Not one time in two pregnancies did I have to do the “bad thing”.
However, once the kids came there was nothing I could do. Many people told me that I would get over it when I had kids. That is NOT true.
Example: My little boy (he was about 4 at the time) started “doing the bad thing” and I started running through the house yelling for my husband. Mason (my little boy) was following me all over the house….therefore getting it all over the place! I was yelling behind me “It will be ok buddy, Mommy will get Daddy.”
Thanks for the laugh today Lindsee!
My fear is the same as yours Lindsee, I went through three pregnancies and didn’t do “the bad thing” as Tanya called it! I also had to let my husband take over when the children did “the bad thing” and have been forever grateful that he can take care of it when they and the animals we have do “the bad thing.” I handled messy diapers which happened a lot more frequently. My other fear for many years were spiders. However, I conquered that fear, with God’s help, before I had children, as he placed many opportunities in front of me to force me to overcome while I was pregnant with my first child. There is nothing worse than driving down a highway doing 65 mph and a huge spider dropping down in front of your face! It’s a wonder I’m still here and didn’t wreck that car!!
I have the same fear as you Lindsee – it’s especially bad when coupled with OCD.
Though I’ve had a ton of fears, from real ones to many bizarre and ridiculous ones, I remembered one the other day and thought I would share it here. Beware, it is highly goofy. 🙂
As a kid I was freaked out by Corned Beef. Yeah, corned beef.
All those little holes, I was scared eyes were going to pop out from all directions. I even swore it was looking at me – I just knew they were in there. Still creeps me out.
Ok sisters thanks for sharing – Mine – chickens/roosters – the real live kind. It’s so bad that when my son was doing chores for friends when they were gone, he got busy at work and couldn’t get there to do the chores. He called me and asked me to go and do them. Calves, fine, sheep, fine, Dogs, fine, cats, fine but then I got to the “chicken house” and called him crying hystericly ( no I’m not proud of it) and said do you REALLY expect me to go in there and feed and water them. He offered to come and do it after he got done at work (hours later after dark) I said NO I will do this sooooo I prayed, sucked it up and went into the chicken house and cried the whole time (Read loud wailing cries) while feeding and watering very startled chickens who couldn’t imagine what on earth had happened to this crazy woman in the chicken house. Yes I know it’s crazy but it’s REAL to me! :o)
My most bizarre fear was realized on Nov. 2, 2012 when I had a head on collison with a deer. I have always been afraid of that and it happened! I survived, deer did not, car was repaired and all is well. Check that one off the most feared list!
CATS!!! Scare me to death:))
Garden gnomes!
Yes.
They creep me out to no end and I am convinced their eyes follow me around:)
My most bizarre fear came from my childhood. We had linoleum steps to our basement which had a metal strip at the end of each of them. I have always been afraid of falling on the steps and hitting my teeth on one of those strips. Now where did that come from?
My second most bizarre fear is that when I did fall, my mom and dad would come running with Merthiolate in hand. Anyone remember tincture of Merthiolate? Ouch! The pain of falling was nothing compared to the sting of that nasty stuff. And then you were orange for days. Memories of a baby boomer.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Hitting a pedestrian while driving.
Dont know where it came from but its very real. Only hits at certain times…but is powerful.
Anyway…dont ride your bike or jog at night! Some of us get terrors from close calls
I have done this 2 times. Once when I was a teen and out from under Gods unbrella, or so I thought. Now recently I have done it again, and then 3 weeks later came close to hitting the same man on the same bike again. But I always know that when I faulter it is to make me aware of a path that may need to be redirected. I so love God and HIS ways.
Can’t wait to get to heaven where we won’t have to deal with all these things!!!
Birds in a confined space, like a garage. They use to get in our garage when I was a kid, it freaked me out b.c. They freaked out!
I have always had an irrational fear of being forced into an insane asylum and NOT being crazy, but not being able to convince anyone that I am there wrongly–and the more I protest, the more they all shake their heads and say how crazy I am! Horror! (this might be from when I was a teen and my mother swore I was ‘crazy’ because I was a very sanguine teen and life was super black and white for me: no ok days, only mountain tops and depths of despair for me!)
Also, I hate those little lizards! I mean, really, a reptile who can run?? EEEK!
INSECTS of all kinds. I ran from a dust bunny once thinking it was a bug. Made my husband vow to kill all insects before I married him. Thank you very much. This is why I love Him!
My irrational fear is volcanoes…go figure I now live on an island!!
Water of unknown depth is my goofy fear. If I can see the bottom, I’m fine. If I can’t see it, you need to tell me that it’s 5 or 50 or 5000 feet deep, approximately. How deep doesn’t matter; I’m not afraid of deep water and I’m a strong swimmer! If I don’t know how deep the murky water is, though, I won’t set more than a foot in it.
My biggest fear ever was loosing my children. In fact in the 90’s I attended a weekend marriage retreat while leaving my 3 and 4 year old son and daughter with a husband and wife ministry team in our church. When we returned we were informed that our son had gotten lost at the mall. I freeked, all while holding him in my arms. The tears welled up and I new at that time that God watches over those whom love and seek him. By the way, this was a husband and wife team at First Baptist, and though my memory fails me as to their name’s I am sure they are still a blessing to many in Houston 20 years later.
I am a little behind with this website, so just got to this post.
I have gone through a few seasons of anxiety/depression which has left me with some irrational fears that I have to combat since they started. Some of them now are hilarious to me and if I speak them out loud dissipate for the mere fact that they are so absurd. During my worst feelings of anxiety I developed a fear of it raining. For some reason I thought I wouldn’t be able to breathe fresh air if it rained. Bigger fears in that, was the fear of nature in general because it was so out of my control. Giving God control has been a hard step for me considering at times I can be a huge control freak.
My craziest fear, that I developed and still have a hard time with is going through an automatic car wash. I laugh at this one knowing it is so absurd and the things I have done while trying to overcome this fear. I once braved it enough to pull in and then when in there started to panic, for some reason I thought it would all be better if I climbed in the back seat, however when I got back there I was in full panic mode and dove back to the front and pulled out while it was spitting soap suds at me. I then calmed down enough to gather my wits and decided these suds could not dry on my vehicle I am going to have to endure the full thing so pulled around, when I went to put more money in for the wash there was a man standing by the machine so I calmly rolled down my window to explain that I had gotten claustrophobic and needed to take a break, when he tells me with a smirk that they have cameras and he saw me climb in the backseat and then back up to pull out. I eventually made it through that wash, but I still have to combat the fear every time I have to get a wash and usually I do it by hand. 🙂
Fear can be difficult, but it also is a time I reflect on knowing that I can be drawn closer to God at these times, because he is bigger than all of these fears.
A book I recommend highly is by Angie Smith, “What Women Fear” It has been very powerful and pivotal in drawing me closer to the Master of all fears!!
Its a very common condition , which can be treated.
You migh find something to help at http://phobiatreatment.org