Stuff in the water doesn't actually frighten me too much. I wouldn't say I'd throw myself into the path of a shark (or even a jellyfish, having experienced the latter first-hand), but it's not a mindless terror. I think the fear of deep water is kind of a merging of two things -- the fear of falling (heights give me slight vertigo and make me feel uneasy but in general don't send me into panic) and the fear of the dark. Down where you can't see the bottom, the water gets very dark, and that scares the absolute bejabbers out of me. So it's not really the notion of being small, which is just disconcerting (since I'm smaller than the world even on land, really), nor of what's in there. It's just the simple fact of not being able to see and knowing it's so far down, potentially so far down and dark the entire way. Yikes. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just writing about it!
Hell, when I lived on the east coast in a region where you had to cross bridges to get anywhere, there were some bridges that could send me into a sheer blind panic. The Throggs-Neck bridge, the bridge to Newport over the Narragansett, the Delaware Memorial bridge, and one of the bridges in Boston, can't recall now which one. Until the night I was driving a 17' rental truck with all my stuff, and two dogs in the front cab with me, and the crosswinds on the Delaware Memorial had a warning sign of being 45mph. There wasn't a place to stop and I was already running late, so I crossed, and changed lanes several times without even moving the steering wheel, the wind was that fierce. I'm pretty sure I started to scream at one point, until the elder dog barked at me.
Then I realized that if I lost it, they'd bear the burden, too. Since then I've sometimes been a little uneasy on bridges, but never again terrified to that point... It didn't really end the terror, mind you. More like Odetta's total lack of distress about my sheer amount of distress got me to the point of realizing I could focus and just power right through it, and I'd survive. It's not pleasant, but it's survivable.
I guess having dogs who won't put up with hysterics can sometimes be a good thing. Heh.
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Date: 6 Nov 2012 11:12 pm (UTC)Hell, when I lived on the east coast in a region where you had to cross bridges to get anywhere, there were some bridges that could send me into a sheer blind panic. The Throggs-Neck bridge, the bridge to Newport over the Narragansett, the Delaware Memorial bridge, and one of the bridges in Boston, can't recall now which one. Until the night I was driving a 17' rental truck with all my stuff, and two dogs in the front cab with me, and the crosswinds on the Delaware Memorial had a warning sign of being 45mph. There wasn't a place to stop and I was already running late, so I crossed, and changed lanes several times without even moving the steering wheel, the wind was that fierce. I'm pretty sure I started to scream at one point, until the elder dog barked at me.
Then I realized that if I lost it, they'd bear the burden, too. Since then I've sometimes been a little uneasy on bridges, but never again terrified to that point... It didn't really end the terror, mind you. More like Odetta's total lack of distress about my sheer amount of distress got me to the point of realizing I could focus and just power right through it, and I'd survive. It's not pleasant, but it's survivable.
I guess having dogs who won't put up with hysterics can sometimes be a good thing. Heh.