That's Good... NO, that's bad!

Growing up, I was a very anxious kid.

I don’t say this lightly. Some of the things I was afraid of included (but were not in any way limited to) the following:

• strings on my bedsheets

• automatic toilets

• the slimy black weasel I was convinced followed me in the hallways of our house at night
• the neighbor's dog
• the neighbor

• speaking. One time I stayed on the bus until the end of its route because it missed my stop and I couldn’t speak up. Everyone in my classes thought I was mute.
• parts of trees that I felt resembled faces too much
• trees in weird shapes

• other people in general. My mom had to set up playdates for me with a kid in my grade, during which time I literally just watched the other kid talk and pick her nose and waited for her to leave.

• my dreams, which featured odd but terrifying at the time imagery. In one such dream, I was eating a plate of pasta that turned out to be a woman’s hair. (This was even before I was primed in horror, so I’m just a natural.)

I was lucky enough to have a mother who not only administered to many of my anxieties patiently but who also indulged my love of books and read to me frequently. The number of bedtime stories I remember loving in childhood is considerable. However, there’s one in particular that sticks out, not because it’s the most nostalgic or beautiful to me, but because it FrEakED mE tHe fuck OUT.

This book went by the name of That’s Good! That’s Bad!

Now, I have no doubt this book was not supposed to be AS terrifying as I found it, otherwise it wouldn’t be suitable for children. Something about it just really got my goat (I was a kid, after all, who was afraid of strings. Strings).

In That’s Good! That’s Bad! a boy goes to the zoo with his parents and is carried away by a big red balloon. He ends up falling into the habitats of just about every creature there before he gets carried back to the arms of his parents safe and sound.

Each time the boy encounters a new situation or animal, the book will say ‘Oh, that’s good’, before doing a 180 and saying ‘No, that’s BAD!” or conversely, “Oh, that’s bad… no, that’s GOOD!”

Either way, you had to turn the page to find out why the situation wasn’t what it seemed.

It made my kid self feel that familiar feeling of missing a step going downstairs, the suspense mounting like dread in my throat. That familiar generalized anxiety feeling of unease I would get when things are going perfectly fine, a dark little voice telling me there was something monstrous I was forgetting.

So - why am I talking about this book if it left such a seemingly negative impression on me?

Because I also loved this book. I asked for it all the time. In fact, I doubt my mother ever thought I was frightened by it- I kept asking her to read it to me after all! Every third bedtime story or so, I’d circle back to That’s Good! That’s Bad!.

It was arguably one of my favorite childhood books, even though it scared the piss out of me.

Because here’s another thing about kid me: I always had to push the envelope. Pick the scab. Press on the bruise. Look when I’m warned not to. Touch things charged with static even though I was terrified of the shock.

To some extent, morbid curiosity is something we all have as people. It’s like we’re all built with an inner sensor that cannot resist things like staring at accidents or turning around when someone else says, don’t look now, but… or, my favorite, smelling something even after someone has explicitly told us: Smell this! It makes me want to throw up :D.

However, the extent to which I engaged in this type of behavior growing up made me certain that I was engaging in some kind of intricate self-sabotage.

I already knew I had a knack for it. My therapist as an adult had told me multiple times that I was an expert in the area of working against my own better interest. Like when I set goals for myself as a creative and then promptly did whatever it took - staying in bed too late so I had to go straight to work, drinking too much the night before- to ensure the work never got done. Like how before I’d even try something new, my brain had already come back to me with 100 reasons, in type-face bold, why this was a Terrible Idea and would Just Come to Nothing or Possible Fatality in the End.

As a still-anxious but properly medicated adult, I recently found That’s Good! That’s Bad! packed away in my parents’ attic and had a little walk down memory lane. Flipping through the pages, I can remember thinking a couple of thoughts.

Number one: this book was not nearly as scary as I remembered it being. The colors were brighter, whereas my mind had cast them in a dark light. But then again, is anything as scary as you thought it was as a child? After all, I am proud to say as a 32-year-old I have finally cured my fear of string and public toilets.

Number two: why, again, did I want this read to me so often? Was it really just a weird kind of self-sabotage, a fore-warning of how messy my brain would get as I grew up?

One thing was certain: it certainly did predict my love of the horror & thriller genre as an adult. Which brought back another memory: when I was in my early twenties and my anxiety had gotten particularly bad, my father once said to me, You should probably stop watching those horror films; that can’t be helping.

Though on the outside this seemed like a completely logical suggestion, I was affronted by his words. No, I argued, I love horror. I’d feel worse if I didn’t have it.

I had to step back and examine this memory. I might have just been arguing to hold onto my self-destructive habits, but I sensed that this wasn’t true. I had truly believed in what I was saying, as little sense as it seemed to make. While I could agree that certain things I did were definitely out of fear and the urge to self-sabotage as a protective measure (fear of success, according to my therapist, was very real and I had been dealt a very large portion), something felt different about the media I chose to consume. Because I did really enjoy an element of horror, both in my books and my movies, and it didn’t feel purely destructive- or really, destructive at all.

So I looked further into it. I went onto Google and typed in something like “I have anxiety but I’m obsessed with horror.” In doing so I found out two things. One, I was definitely not alone in exhibiting this phenomenon. And two, there might actually be a productive reason my brain sought out this kind of stimuli.

Apparently, in seeking out anxiety-inducing experiences on screen or in the pages of a book, we feel better-armed against our daily anxiety. After all, no matter how horrible what we’re watching or reading seems to us, no matter how much it scares us, it’s a fear we have control over. Our logical brain knows that we are safe on our couch or in bed. There’s a plenitude of articles that go deeper into the subject, as well as possible other reasons we do this, but one of my favorites is here.

Was my brain not actually trying to sabotage me for once, but trying to put me through some kind of self-help exercise instead? I knew that, as counter-intuitive as it was, these things were good for me the same way controlled exposure therapy is good for people with phobias. And that’s essentially what it was- exposure therapy.

I felt good afterwards because I had faced the fear and I had come out alive. Furthermore, I had the knowledge that no matter how scary things got, I could get through it and come out unscathed, perhaps even stronger.

A classic case of Oh, that’s Bad… No, That’s GOOD!

{thanks for reading! If you loved this walk down Psycho-analyzing My Child Self Lane, please drop a me a heart! Tips are appreciated but absolutely not necessary. Until next time, bury your face in your favorite morbid read for me, willya? xx RAIST }

Fuck yourself up some more with a depressing dystopian story, on the house: