Conquering My Fears

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I am no more terrorised by the thought of becoming blind. There was a time when I was. I was so tormented by the thought that the mere mention of anything even remotely connected to blindness would give me the jitters. I had no control whatsoever over this irrational fear and at times; it would envelope my entire consciousness leaving me in a zombiesh state. Try as I may, I would not be able to concentrate on anything else. It was a web, in which, I was trapped and in which, I could only get entangled further, not escape. I had dabbled a bit in psychology and had also read about the powers of autosuggestion. For two months, I religiously practised it for an hour before sleeping and an hour after waking up. To no avail. The fear was there to stay. It was a parasite, which attacks the host’s internal organs and weakens its system.

Only, this was slowly and sadistically devouring my sanity.

On the one hand, I was so mortally terrified of this irrational fear (I knew it was irrational) and on the other, I was one of the most reckless daredevils ever. I would accept any kind of challenges from anyone, where life was at stake. Be it spending the night in a cemetery or walking on the terrace walls of a skyscraper blindfolded or even playing Russian roulette. I was enthralled by the idea of death and, the fear that people experienced when they faced death amused me. I was told that I displayed a strong affinity to morbidity.

People would find my jokes on dead babies obscene and cruel and call me a heartless creep. They looked at me with disgust mixed with horror because I enjoyed nightmares. I had a fantastic imagination for the macabre albeit subconsciously and I found it very fascinating. I would recount my nightmares to my friends of both genders (sometimes adding my tuppence for dramatic effect). And to see the expressions on the guys’ faces and hear the squeals of ‘enough’ and ‘no more’ from the girls gave me a perverse satisfaction. I was even ostracised by a set of gutless jerks from the click, which we had formed, because few could stomach my bizarre thoughts. They, of course, did not know about the fears I had nurtured for so many years within myself.

Their feelings towards me, and, their opinion of me, notwithstanding, I actually liked the unique reputation I had built up, though not by design. Because the fact of the matter is that I was a little weird by conventional standards. I thrived on reading horror stories, the more gruesome the better and there was nothing I liked better than watching a scary movie just before I went to bed. Often, things that brought out extreme reactions from others, reactions bordering on fear, left me practically unfazed. Like my friend and I almost met with an accident once and while he was shaken up for sometime after the episode, I was my usual, unaffected self. Cold is what my friends called me. I liked that.

But for some reason, I always had two fears. One strong and the other not-so-strong. The not-so-strong fear was the fear of roaches. A reasonable fear, I think, because lots of people I know are scared of roaches.

Most people are horrified by the mere sight of them and would not want anything to do with them. I belonged to this fraternity.

The other fear, as I have already mentioned, the stronger one, was the fear of becoming blind. Maybe it was a story I read about a lunatic who punctured his own eyes with a pin, maybe it was something else.

Whatever it may have been, I was more terrorised by the thought of becoming blind than anything else in the world.