Yesterday's blog got a comment from Harwood Red about physco babble. I know she didn't mean any offence, as we are great friends. Perhaps I didn't write clearly enough of the horrors your mind can play in the three years that I suffered from this phobia.
I literally went from a happy go lucky child to someone who couldn't leave the house unless I was forced to, and only then if I was accompanied. I was sometimes late for school, something I'd never been. Rather than walk a half mile to school I sometimes walked three miles because I'd once seen a dog loose on a particular road.
It does now seem like madness, irrational, and as confusing now as my parents found it then.
What I can see now though, is that it was at exactly the same time that I knew I was different from other lads. I remember reading a problem page in my Mum's magazine, and it saying that children can sometimes go through 'phases', and that they usually grew out of them. I went to bed everynight and prayed that God would make me 'normal'. It's not the sort of thing a nine year old can go and talk to his parent's about at that age, no matter how loving.
'Mum, Dad, you know how everyone calls me a puff, including my best friend's Dad? Well I think I am.'
Er....no, not really. It was hard enough to come to terms with myself, alone, with no help, and hard enough for them to hear for real when I was seventeen.
Like Slinky commented, bad things can make you stronger. The childish phobia I created to take my mind off what was the real problem, has made me stronger, and fearless. and the fairly decent person I am today.
I literally went from a happy go lucky child to someone who couldn't leave the house unless I was forced to, and only then if I was accompanied. I was sometimes late for school, something I'd never been. Rather than walk a half mile to school I sometimes walked three miles because I'd once seen a dog loose on a particular road.
It does now seem like madness, irrational, and as confusing now as my parents found it then.
What I can see now though, is that it was at exactly the same time that I knew I was different from other lads. I remember reading a problem page in my Mum's magazine, and it saying that children can sometimes go through 'phases', and that they usually grew out of them. I went to bed everynight and prayed that God would make me 'normal'. It's not the sort of thing a nine year old can go and talk to his parent's about at that age, no matter how loving.
'Mum, Dad, you know how everyone calls me a puff, including my best friend's Dad? Well I think I am.'
Er....no, not really. It was hard enough to come to terms with myself, alone, with no help, and hard enough for them to hear for real when I was seventeen.
Like Slinky commented, bad things can make you stronger. The childish phobia I created to take my mind off what was the real problem, has made me stronger, and fearless. and the fairly decent person I am today.
