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Scared of Things that Aren't There

My Personal Experience

By Scarlett WoodPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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Hello! This is my first story in Psyche and I am very excited but also anxious to share my experiences and struggles with the world. I hope that anyone who reads them can learn something new since my goal is for people to see and understand a different point of view in my life. A life of a 17-year-old with many struggles but also strengths.

Paranoia. Many people think that someone who suffers from paranoia is crazy. But that's not always the case. There are so many different variations in disorders like this that you can never know in what extent someone is struggling, whether it's walking alone at night or something as simple as going to drink water in the middle of the night.

Paranoia is part of many mental disorders but is most often present in psychotic disorders. It can turn into delusions because at some point irrational thoughts and beliefs become so fixed that nothing can convince a person that what they think or feel is not true.

Ever since I was young I remember being a scaredy-cat. Even now I have more phobias than I can count. The ones that bother me the most are:

  • Arachnophobia (fear of spiders)
  • Entomophobia or Insectophobia (fear of insects)
  • Thalassophobia (fear of the sea, in my case deep waters)
  • Ichthyophobia (fear of fish)

Having two older sisters wasn't very helpful either. They would always find ways to scare me around the house, like chasing me with cicadas (a very common insect where I'm from) or with small knots of hair that I thought to be spiders. The one thing I remember vividly was them, closing all the doors and lights in the hall and me, sitting there in the dark while they popped out of the darkness scaring me.

Because of that, as the years passed, I would occasionally be scared to go inside a room before the light was on or run out of it when it closed. I honestly felt that someone was going to grab me or that something was hiding in the darkness. Kid's imagination right? Or so I thought.

The past few days I have been very paranoid about being alone in my room, especially when I'm trying to sleep, something that has only happened to me when I was very young. I'm just waiting for something to come out of nowhere and hurt me without knowing who or what it is in particular. I keep telling myself that it's not real and that nothing bad is going to happen to me but my brain won't listen.

Two days ago I went to sleep at 11:30 PM and didn't actually fall asleep until 2 AM. During these 2 1/2 hours, I was so paranoid and scared that I even took my cat out of my room because I thought she was going to go crazy and hurt me. Another thing to add is that these past few months I haven't been closing my blinds all the way to wake up easily in the morning, something that changed now because of the fear that if I look outside someone or something is going to be there watching me.

I never gave it that much thought but now, thinking back, I have realized how much it has scarred me. I think it's weird how such a small action such as this one, older sisters "playing" with the youngest, can have such a big influence on someone's mental health and everyday life.

A/N: I'm not an expert on this matter. Whether I have a mild case of paranoia or not is up to my therapist and me to find out. I just want to help and find other people that might experience the same problems as me.

trauma
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About the Creator

Scarlett Wood

Just a 17-year-old helping people through their struggles while trying to do the same.

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