OK, I'm curious!  What is your phobia, Fil?

I seem to remember you posting a link to a description of this *thing*.
It was pretty strange!

One wonders where such a phobia would comes from. Is she afraid of
cucumbers, too, or just the pickled variety? :)

Sorry, I don't mean to be dismissive. I've had plenty of weird phobias
myself, so I guess that's where my sense of humor about it comes from.
To me there is something inherently funny about a weird phobia, although
I know from personal experience that it's not funny when you're scared.
Actually, it has occasionally helped me to joke about it, even during
an anxiety attack - it helps keep the fear at bay. (Doesn't work once
I'm in a full-blown panic, though.)

Joyce

I used to have a terrible phobia of the subway. And this wasn't a nice
subway like in Europe, or Montreal, or Washington, DC. It was the Boston
MBTA, which was about 50 years old or thereabouts.

I wasn't afraid of real things like getting mugged. No, I was afraid of
the train stopping in the tunnel under Boston Harbor because of a water
leakage, causing us all to drown, or of poison fumes, or something like
that. I used to freak out when the train stopped dead in the middle of
a long tunnel between stations, and then just sit there, while the
driver offered no explanation whatsoever.

One time the train did this at rush hour with a packed train. I suddenly
felt kind of dizzy and off kilter, and wondered if I were breathing bad
fumes. So I asked a woman standing next to me if she felt weird, and she
said yes. I totally lost it - ran up to the front of the car, which just
happened to be the first car so the driver's cab was right there. And I
started banging on the door, yelling, "What is HAPPENING? What is going
on?? Tell me what's going on!!" and so on. The door opened and the driver
let me come into the cab. He was very nice to me, and explained that we
were just waiting for a red light to turn green, because there was a train
stopped in a station ahead of us.

After we started moving again, I calmed down. And, as would happen a lot
once I started calming down after a panic attack, I started to feel
extremely embarrassed and ashamed of how I'd acted. I did *not* want to
go back out into that train and face the other passengers, who I'm sure
all thought I was a nutcase. (And I guess I sort of was.) The driver let
me sit in the cab with him all the way to my station, which was at the
end of the line! Being someone who's had panic disorder most of my life,
I have encountered some very kind people under these sorts of circumstances.
Their empathy always amazes me.

Later on, I thought back to the moment I'd freaked, and I realized that
the reason I felt a little off-kilter was because the train had stopped
on slightly slanted ground. The train was tilted slightly sideways, and
it wasn't obvious enough to be seen (anyway, you couldn't see anything
outside the train for reference), so this gave it a slight funhouse
effect where I felt gravity pulling me a little bit to the side, without
knowing why.

After that, I rode buses exclusively for about a year. I absolutely
refused to get on a subway train. But eventually I started to relax
a bit about it, and could ride trains again, although I was always a
bit anxious about it.

Joyce

So true. My arachnophobia is completely irrational, because we don't
even have any poisonous spiders in Finland. And I'm not even scared of
being bitten, it's just the form of them that scares me. It is like evil
incarnate to me. I don't like them any better dead than alive.

I also have a fear of heights. Maybe that's a bit more rational. I mean,
if you fall down from a high place, you *will* get hurt or die. But
that's not what the fear of heights is about. It's that when you are
somewhere high up, you can feel yourself falling, though you are
standing on solid ground.

A former boyfriend once tried to cure my fear of heights by forcing me
to climb a steep cliff. Duh! He just made it worse.

I was lucky to have family with me both times. If I had been alone, I
might have stayed on the stairs at the Falls till the management
rescued me!

--
CATherine