Phobias

[Overcomer]

I'm with you on the heights.  Have dreams where I am paralyzed with fear and I cannot move...................it reminds me of when I was a kid and we moved into this house with a catwalk...............you could see off it on both sides and my dog crouched real low and scurried across right in the middle........boy, that was 35 years ago.

Also, can't stand to be in bed and have a kid on one side, a dog on the other and two cats sitting on top of me - under the covers.  If I am on top of the covers, ok...........

And the thought of being buried alive.  I hate to admit it but I watch soaps at night on Soapnet.  I was watching All My Children and Greg Madden was buried alive and taunted for several days and eventually died...............freaky.  Also there were a couple of movies called Buried Alive and Buried Alive 2.................Scary.  Then I heard that the term "saved by the bell" was coined when in the past they thought people had died so they buried them with a string attached to a bell ABOVE the grave.  If the grave keeper heard a bell, he would go out and dig up a person who they thought was dead but came to in the coffin!!

[Hopalong]

Adrift, I so understand this. I was very scarred by the cruelty of girls when I was young. What cured me was seeking out women's support groups and women's events. It was amazing.

FIND WOMEN WHO DON'T DO THAT AND YOU'LL LOSE YOUR FEAR OF WOMEN WHO DO! It's only their own fears, their own sense of lack of any meaningful power in life, that makes some women "cut" each other by making those superficial judgments. One cure could be to intentionally dress "against the rules", endure the shocked glances, and find out the sky didn't fall.

(Sorry about the caps, I do get worked up on this issue...it's fear and lack of consciousness that makes some women judge each other that way. But it's not all women, not all occasions.)

Find and befriend your inner rebel, Adrift. She wants out! And she has friends out there!

hugs,
Hops

[adrift]

Adrift, I so understand this. I was very scarred by the cruelty of girls when I was young. What cured me was seeking out women's support groups and women's events. It was amazing.

FIND WOMEN WHO DON'T DO THAT AND YOU'LL LOSE YOUR FEAR OF WOMEN WHO DO! It's only their own fears, their own sense of lack of any meaningful power in life, that makes some women "cut" each other by making those superficial judgments. One cure could be to intentionally dress "against the rules", endure the shocked glances, and find out the sky didn't fall.

(Sorry about the caps, I do get worked up on this issue...it's fear and lack of consciousness that makes some women judge each other that way. But it's not all women, not all occasions.)

Find and befriend your inner rebel, Adrift. She wants out! And she has friends out there!
hugs,
Hops

Very interesting!  PP probably needs to find her rebel too.   I'm not sure how to find my rebel self,but if I do I'll let you know.    

And Kelly, I didn't know that about "saved by the bell".  There actually was a lady from my old home town who was almost buried alive many, many years ago. My dad knew the story which was told from his childhood. This lady would have seizures that made her appear to be dead.  The coffin was already closed, the funeral had started inside the church and her sister arrived from out of town and begged to see her "dead"  sister one last time, so they opened the casket.  Theory is that the fresh air swooping in revived her, anyway the "dead" sister sat right up in the casket and the mourners were jumping out of windows and ploughing through the doors.  The poor woman lived a miserable life after that because everyone in her circle  thought she was a witch or ghost and wouldn't speak to her or come near her. 

[Overcomer]

Geez!!!  That's what horror stories are made of.  Every time I go to a funeral I have these visions in my mind that the dead's eyes pop open.  I ccouldn't make myself touch a dead person until about a year ago when my step-grandfather passed.  My daughter touched him so I thought I would touch his hand.  He was cold.  That is what shocked me - no warmth.

And mean girls?  Well, my daughter has to deal with them and even I at work.  We have one in particular who always stirs the pot.  Lurks in the aisle next to where you are chatting with someone and eaves drops.........so says things in front of a crowd - almost daring you to call her on it.  Meanwhile, my other friend runs three miles a day and does bun and thigh exercises.  She's over 50 and wears a 2 - I wear a 16.  I cannot keep up with that but she cannot NOT.  She is obsessed with her looks and she really is pretty.  I wish I had it in me so I could beat this self-fulfilling prophecy of fat and ugly....

[pennyplant]

My inner rebel--

A little secret I will tell here--

In August I went and got a tattoo!  It's of a dragonfly with ribbons and vines and it's on my lower back.  I showed everybody at work and made quite a sensation for several days.  I might get another one too!

There's hope for me yet!!

Pennyplant

[gratitude28]

OOOOh Penny,
I am afraid to get a tattoo... afraid I won't want to stop... I'll end up the tattooed lady if I start, I fear...

Portia thanks  for elaborating on the can of worms. I feel so queazy just thinking about it.And I don't like bad smells, either...

As for the deal with my grandmother... do you have a few hours??? I will try to condense it...She was an N?/alcoholic (all the way). She talked incessantly of the need to be beautiful and rich.My parents left me with her a lot.She would keep me up until the wee hours of the morning playing cards (at three, four years old... younger even...).Nothing I ever did was right. No matter how thin I got, she would say it was not thin "All dress sizes are different."SHe hated my grandfather (also a messed up guy) and slept with other men and would tell me things like that he forced her to have sex and that is how she got pregnant with my aunt, etc. (when I was 5 or younger... ).She never loved anyone but herself and loved to play little dramas. Their house was large with a parlor and a large oil painting of her looking lovely in the living room.

My mother has "apologized" that I spent time with her as she believes that is why I am so different and became an alcoholic and such.My mother loves to talk about how awful dad's parents are/were (they both do) but you never hear one single word about anything bad with her family. My grandmother, BTW, was also very mean to my mother.

I remember, like I said, that she would say, you know you are going to die. And she would talk about ghosts. And she knew I loved the ocean. So she would tell me that man o' war were everywhere and would get me. Or sharks. Or other poisonous animals.It's hard to remember her now, but I remember that I was in Kindergarten, walking to class and crying because I knew I would die and I didn't know what it would be like not to be here.

Thanks for the listen!! Portia, was that your dad's mom or your mom's?

[Hopalong]

Beth,
Your grandmother was a sadistic horrible woman and I hate vehemently dislike her and would probably hate her if I didn't try not to hate due to religious principles!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Take that, you old child-frightening bat!

Hops

[Portia]

Beth

Your grandmother reminds me of  N/disturbed woman movies, Sunset Boulevard for one. She really was a nasty, bitter grand-dame wasn’t she? Glad you can see it for what it was now (i.e. bullshit!!). I’d like to make a film starting with the scene of this poor little girl sitting playing cards at 3am with her grandmother who is decked out in jewels and rich clothes, the painting of her looming over the card table….and the film would end with the girl who is now a woman selling the painting (she’s a high-flying art dealer) for $1000s to an elderly woman who is exactly the same as the grandmother, and the girl gets her due by taking the cash off this vain old lady, smiling at herself at her circle of recovery and life’s strange way of paying back old abuses. Yeah. I can see it! My grandmother was okay apart from the grisly tales (she was my Dad’s mother). She used to play shop with me and stuff, which my mother never did! My mother’s mother on the other hand was not a nice person. She didn’t like female children, including my mother, which of course explains a lot. All sad stuff.

Hops, I loved Babe!

[adrift]

Wow! We have some crazy s##t in our lives, huh? 

Beth, your grandmom was a horrible old woman.  Sorry you had to go through that.

Go PP, glad you got a tatoo!! 

[Hopalong]

Re. tatooed ladies: all for it.
what I'm agin is UGLY tattoos...

My poor dear D decked herself out with some truly Goth and truly unatractive sailor-type tattoos in the middle of her worst year, at 19...

My advice would be go to an art museum and consult books of design...choose your tattoo art (unless you can design it yourself) from a beautiful source. Fewer regrets later, I think.

Hops

[Stormchild]

Try the Book of Kells. There are some incredibly beautiful designs in there...

[Stormchild]

The two things I am most afraid of are:

(1) losing my animals to an apartment fire while I am at work, and never knowing about it until afterwards

(2) being in an accident or wrongly imprisoned, and having my animals starve to death because nobody cared enough to rescue them while I was unable to get to them.

[adrift]

The two things I am most afraid of are:

(1) losing my animals to an apartment fire while I am at work, and never knowing about it until afterwards

(2) being in an accident or wrongly imprisoned, and having my animals starve to death because nobody cared enough to rescue them while I was unable to get to them.

So sweet you love your animals. How many animals do you have??  Don't you have someone who would feed them for you if you couldn't get home???  I can understand your fear.

[Stormchild]

No, all of my immediate family are dead except the N sibling, from whom I am estranged.

I work with people who think meanness is funny, most of them anyway; the ones who aren't like that would freak out and panic if I ever suggested a key exchange for emergencies, because nobody does such things there.

I have some quite nice neighbors and the apartment staff are wonderful, but I don't think they keep close enough tabs on the residents that they'd notice I was gone until it was too late...

I've had petsitters, but my really good one retired, and I've had such bad experiences with new ones that I don't have one right now. Things like they left water running and flooded the kitchen counters, and so forth. But again, if someone doesn't know I'm not coming home they won't know to save the critters.

This is the only part of living alone that I didn't anticipate - otherwise I love it, the peace and the solitude and the freedom from abuse is as fresh and relaxing and soothing and satisfying today as it was on my first day of escape, all those years ago.

thanks adrift, I really appreciate your kindness. I have two animals... two dearly loved cats. But I've had just about everything you can imagine as a pet - mice, rats, turtles, fish, an albino toad, garter snakes, and I used to do baby wild animal rescue and fostering [birds, squirrels, raccoons, possums] until it became illegal for laypeople to do it.

Only thing I wouldn't ever have as a pet is a reptile that eats live mammals. I have a thing about mammals vs. reptiles - I'll feed a snake to a mouse, if I have to, but I won't feed a mouse to a snake. I'm closer kin to the mouse, and I feel it in my bones. Weird, I know.

[pennyplant]

My tattoo is very pretty.  Blue, purple and green.  If I get another one it will have to "go with" the first one.  It will be something from nature or a celtic design.

Getting the tattoo was one of the very things I have ever done where I was completely present in the moment.  Well, eighty minutes to be exact.  A surprisingly good experience all around.  Now I understand better why my son enjoys it so much.  But I had to come around to that on my own.  Previously I did not understand his fascination with tattooing at all.  I didn't do it for that reason.  That was sort of a by-product.  A good one.

Pennyplant