FEAR

Part One

Fear is a horrible thing. I will not watch horror films because I cannot stand to be scared in the least bit. Maybe it goes back to young years when my dad scared me with a clown statue we had. I wrote a post about that on April 6, 2020. The link is below.

Clowns

Maybe my fear was enhanced by the scary movies I watched as a teen. You might not be able to walk outside at night or even to another room after watching a horror or suspenseful movie. I couldn’t. Still can’t.

I had a sort of traumatic experience take place at a haunted park. Actually, it wasn’t the park that was supposed to be haunted. It was a haunted house set up in the park for Halloween that was supposed to be scary. I’m not a haunted house type person but three of my kids wanted to go. So we went.

When we got to the entrance of the haunted house we were told that the “actors” were taking a break for a little while. We saw the monsters and the dead walking together in a large group through the park to the restroom. The kids and I stood there discussing how long we wanted to wait. We decided to start walking back toward our van. I wasn’t all that thrilled to do the haunted house thing anyway…so maybe I did strongly influence the decision to leave and find something else to do that night.

As we were walking through the park, we looked back off to the left and saw the group walking away from the building that housed the restrooms. We kept walking and every so often we’d glance back at them. Then the group looked at us. We walked on. I looked back again and the group was watching us. They turned together and began to walk toward us. I told the kids to walk faster. The group then walked faster too. Soon we were running through the park and they were running too…after us! The faster we ran the faster they ran. I was terrified. I panicked. I needed to get away…now! In order to pick up my momentum, I actually used my hands to push off on the two kids running next to me. Yes…I did that. I placed my hands on their chests and pushed myself forward leaving my children behind. It wasn’t one of my proudest mommy moments.

After realizing what I had done, I came to my senses. I stopped in my tracks and turned around. In a split second, I was nose-to-nose with Jason Voorhees, who appeared to be the group’s leader, and although I’ve never seen the “Friday, the 13th” movies, I’ve heard enough to understand why the others would follow him.

I screamed in Jason’s face.

“STOP! Just STOP!”

He didn’t say a word. We stood there locked on each other’s eyes. That’s all I could see of his face. Finally…he turned to leave and the group followed him back to the haunted house. Truthfully, I sorta felt bad.

We didn’t go through the house that night. We had our own scary story to tell that was even better than a walk through a haunted house. We went to the van and laughed all the way home. I might have teared up a bit too. I also apologized.

Fear was very real to me. I’m not sure how each of you deal with it but fear can keep me from thinking rationally. It can definitely keep me from leaving a foot dangling over the edge of my bed, uncovered.

There are other fears though that are not related to scary movies or haunted parks, clowns, or even standing up to Jason Voorhees and screaming into his masked face. Fears that prevent you from living a full life.

How do you handle fear? I don’t handle it well as you can see. But I no longer have anything to do with these types of scary things. That helps a great deal.

I’m splitting this post into two parts. Part one is lengthy enough. 😊

FEAR, Part Two, coming up.

Happy Friday, the 13th! ♥️

Andi