Things that shouldn't scare me

1. The Dark

I am 17 years old yet sometimes I still do the thing where I turn off the light switch, run and leap into bed.

    

2.Mannequins

Something about mannequins has always unnerved me. Sometimes I'll be walking through a shopping centre and I'll see a very tall well dressed person through the corner of my eye when suddenly...

The ones that aren't missing limbs or heads are not much better. Either they'll have a fierce and mutated face or no face at all.

3.Giant Squids

I have to admit giant squids themselves actually are quite scary. Think of a giant tentacle monster, with soulless eyes and a huge crushing beak that lives in the darkest depths of the ocean.

...or some poorly monitored public swimming pools

I shouldn't be scared of them for the same reason I'm not scared of grizzly bears- I'm very unlikely to ever encounter one. But every time I think about being on the same planet as one of these creatures I make a large donation to NASA to fund finding planets able to support human life.

4.Potato Sprouts

The others may be a bit silly or immature but this one is just plain weird.

As you may or may not know; when you leave potatoes in the pantry for too long they'll start growing weird sprout thingies. Poisonous sprouts.

I won't go into too much detail about the circumstances but sometime last year my mother was away for a few weeks and I was left in charge of half of the house. Dishes piled up and food expired so one fateful day I opened the cupboard to fetch some potatoes and instead discovered mutant alien monsters.

After weeks of neglect they'd grown to about 30cm long- and I had to clean them up. So I did the most logical thing, put on gloves and scream hysterically every time one of the sprouts touched me.

Potato = yum.  Potato with sprouts= death

I hadn't known until this day I was even uncomfortable with potatoes growing things but as soon as I saw them something in my brain just snapped. The way the sprouts seemed to move and sway without influence, like they had a mind of their own.

5.Talking on the Phone

This fear tops the rest of them by far. I absolutely dread talking on the phone. I'd rather have a dark party with mannequins and giant squids serving potatoes with sprouts than call customer service.

I already struggle with talking to people face to face but put a phone in-between us and the terror is timed by a hundred. Because in real life conversations silences are sometimes okay. If we run out of interesting things to say we can look at clouds, pull weird faces or pretend to text.

On the phone, in my mind at least, any silences are absolutely NOT okay.

Talking to strangers is the worst. I never answer the home phone if I'm home alone and if a private number or one I don't recognize comes up on my phone I often just let it ring out watching in horror.

I wish I could say talking to people I know is easy but I still get quite nervous even around friends I've known for years. When we first started dating my boyfriend suggested calling me. I was so scared I wanted to throw my phone out window. Now I do enjoy our phone conversations but not everyone is as easy to talk to as him.

Perhaps the worst thing about this fear is that it's a normal part of life and not many other people (that I know of) find this at all unpleasant or challenging. And I can't see myself getting over it anytime soon.