I have asphyxiphobia. There, I said it, and for some reason it's been very bad the past couple of months. I think I nearly had a panic attack a while back. I never had one before. If I owned a gun I might have shot myself. So there you have it. It comes and goes. It's been much better lately though.
I had a couple of bad experiences when I was a kid that left me without air until I nearly passed out. Those were probably the source of the phobia even though it only started hitting me a few years ago. When you're young you don't think about dying, but now that I'm in those prime heart attack years, I suddenly have this phobia that's hit me. I wrote a very short tidbit about it a couple of years ago (though in a veiled context) within a novelette where one of the characters was afraid that death might be a life after death state of never being able to breathe forever. Could the fires of a real Hell be any worse? I don't believe any of that though. Not really. It's mostly just dying from not being able to breathe that I worry about. Once I'm dead I honestly don't think it will be a problem.
Strange the fears we pick up later in life. A lot of people seem to do it. When we're young we're so fearless.
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Keep breathing!!! That would be a difficult phobia to overcome, it's not like flying or being afraid of water.
ReplyDeleteIt's weird. I feel totally stupid. I might as well be afraid of spiders or something equally silly. But it's been getting better lately.
DeleteDon't feel bad, I am sort of afraid of grass hoppers. And clowns. The grass hopper thing is silly but the clown phobia is justified.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever notice that there were no scary stories about clowns prior to the 1970s (at least none I've ever come across), yet for some strange reason, many of us who were kids in the 60s were afraid of them and had nightmares about them? I thought an evil clown lived under my bed as a child. Why would I think such a thing? They didn't scare me after grade school, but I marvel that any of us were ever afraid of them to begin with since there was nothing in the media that would generate that fear to the best of my knowledge.
Deletedo you see how that is not the same thing? You have a fear. Or do you go around twenty four hours a day in a panic thinking a clown or grasshopper is going to show up> That would be a phobia. Nothing to compare that to.
DeleteI beg to differ. People who are afraid of heights or water are only afraid when confronted with heights and water. If you're only afraid of grasshoppers when confronted with one, that's exactly the same as any other phobia.
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