Are you afraid of the dark? Because I am.

Yes, I admit it, I am afraid of the dark. 
Hello, and welcome to "How to be pathetic at 17 with Emily".

There are really five major things that I'm scared of. As in sick to my stomach, tiny (or massive) panic attack want to cry scared. And here they are:

Spiders:
HolymotherofGod I hate spiders. Words cannot describe the deep-seated gut wrenching fear I have had for spiders for as long as I can remember. Even the tiny ones freak me out and make me feel sick to my stomach. At New Year's I was down the coast visiting family and my Dad's cousin thought it would be fun to pick up this giant Huntsman that was chillin outside and let all the kids play with it, because while it is huge and hairy and creepy and terrifying, it is, in all fairness, completely harmless. If it bites you it'll hurt, but that's about it. But that is not why I'm scared of spiders, oh no. I'm scared because they are the sort of creature that only Satan himself could have designed, and then immediately regretted. So the kids are all outside playing with the big creepy spider, and I'm peacefully inside texting people, when suddenly I hear a little "Emilyyy" I look up, not seeing the adorable face of my three year old cousin-y-person (he's related to me somehow...) instead there is Satan's nightmare perched on two tiny hands right near my face. I scream and jump out of my seat, knocking it to the ground in the process, which elicits laughter from the children and my Dad's cousin. I retreat away from the spider, feeling like I might have just escaped with my life. Suddenly a voice from outside calls out the words that destroyed my short lived piece of mind: "Bailey, why don't you take it to her?"
My mind went blank with a sudden panic that overshadowed everything that had happened in my life up until this point. I didn't even have the sense to remember that while terrifying, this spider was not at all poisonous, nor aggressive, as it sat placidly on the hands of a three year old. No. All my mind could tell me was: "This is it. This is how you die. This is the end." My saviour came in the form of a quick burst of inspiration: run. And so I did. I turned and I ran from a giggling toddler. I ran to my room and went to lock the door and jump on the bed and break down, but ohno. ohgodno. There was no lock. I could hear the giggles at my door now. I would have to hold the door closed to prevent this hell bent child controlled by the urge to see the panic on my face and the voice of his father from entering my haven with the best from hell. And then I hear the words that were the undoing of my last shred of dignity: "Put it under the door Bailey." I see the little pink finger tips suddenly emerge under my door. I move as far away from the door as I can without letting go of the handle. Logically I know that since the fingers can barely fit under, there's no way that the spider could, but logic holds no power over me any more. "BAILEY GO AWAY! TAKE IT AWAY BAILEY! NO! STOP! STOP NOW BAILEY!" I screech (an atrocious sound, but under the circumstances, perfectly justified) finally the fingers leave and I hear his angel of a mother calling him away and admonishing him for terrorizing his cousin. I let go of the door finally and collapse on my bed shaking. 
I don't like spiders.

Birds:

Birds are scary. Like seriously, you can't tell what they're thinking. If a dog is about to attack you, you can tell, with a bird you can't tell until it's too late and they've just impaled the back of your head with their razor sharp beaks. I don't mind small birds, or birds that don't, well, look like "birds" (for example: chickens, ducks, flamingos, geese, swans, emus, penguins, etc.) It's just the medium sized bird shaped ones. Especially magpies and crows. Magpies have the evil swooping reputation, and crows just look like they are the harbingers of death and evil. The main reason I first became afraid of birds was we were at the beach having fish and chips, as you do, and as is customary, a flock of seagulls had surrounded us, looking for any scraps we might be unfortunate enough to drop. There was one seagull though, that didn't squawk (that looks totally wrong, but I googled it and google said that's how you spell it, and I trust google) or flap around like the others. It just stood there, still as a statue with eyes as black as death and a soul equally dark. This evil black eyed seagull didn't stop there however. The torture of it's incessant stare did not end when we had finished eating and departed that particular place on the beach, no. This seagull, soul as black as night and intentions that would put the most hardened criminal to shame, followed us around the beach for the better part of an hour. By the end of this hour I was, to put it mildly: freaking the fuck out. No one believed me that this seagull had been following us. No one believed I'd seen pure evil in it's eyes and the heart of a killer. Oh no. They went merrily along on their way, oblivious to the new evil I had found in this world- birds. 

Heights:
This one's pretty normal tbh. Heights are a very logical thing to be scared of, I mean if you fall you die, so yeah. Though a lot of people I know who are "ohmygosh, I'm terrified of heights, they are the worst" are, by my standards not afraid of heights. The three metre diving board in swimming lessons reduced me to tears. I don't even like looking down over my 160cm (shorter than me) high loft bed. I'm kind of pathetic :P

Shower drains:
This is probably my most unusual fear, but it's also less acute than the others, this is a fear more out of habit and an all consuming fear when I was younger than something that terrifies me personally now. But I physically cannot bring myself to stand on the drain in the shower. If I do it by accident I have a mini heart attack and think I'm about to die for a second, leaping off (veeeery safe in the shower) and taking a minute to calm back down. This, very odd fear, originated when I was six or seven, we were on holidays at a beach resort in Puerto Galera in the Philippines. This was our go to holiday spot when we lived in the Philippines and it got to the point where all the staff knew us, and every time that we left the bartender (who absolutely loved me) would jokingly ask my parents if they could just leave me there until they next returned on holidays. So we had the same beach house that we had every time, a house that seemed almost like a second home to me, and after a lovely day on the beach I came home to have a shower before dinner. I entered the bathroom and went to turn on the shower to warm up when I saw it. There, in the bottom of the shower was the most horrific creature I had ever seen to that day. It was a big, black, worm like creature with a jet black mane around what I could only assume was it's face, though I did not get close enough to inspect. I ran out of that room faster than I'd ever run in my little life, screaming for my mother. She came running, thinking I'd somehow grievously injured myself, which wouldn't be the first time, instead she found me in tears, blubbering incoherently about this manifestation of evil itself sitting in the shower. She went to inspect what all the fuss was about, and upon finding, what I can now only assume was a rather large black caterpillar, washed it down the drain with little fuss. To me however, this was an unacceptable disposal of the monster, how did she know it wouldn't come back to seek out revenge on the person who had so callously washed it away, and me, being the nearest person as I bathed, would be but it's first victim in a quest to rid the word of the person who had tried to kill it. My mother simply laughed at me and told me to have my shower or I'd be late for dinner, but ever since that day I haven't been able to completely shake the feeling that that creature mutated during it's time in the drain and is just waiting for the perfect time to enact it's revenge.

The dark:
This one's kind of hard to explain, because it's not the dark I'm scared of necessarily, it's more what's in the dark. And I'm not sure if it's the supernatural side of the things-that-go-bump-in-the-dark that I'm scared of, or the actual people side of it that scares me, but I think it's a bit of both. The people aspect is an underlying fear that I've had for years that someone is going to break into our house while we're all asleep and steal all our stuff and also potentially, well there's no nice way to say this- kill us. I watched a show when I was young where that happened and it freaked me out, and there was this one girl who'd had her throat slit, but they hadn't done it properly, and she had to wait till they left then go to the neighbour's house and it was like the worst thing I'd ever seen, so when my brother thinks it's a good idea to walk around upstairs at two in the morning that is my first thought. My second is Slenderman. Ever since my friends forced me to play the game and then watch Marble Hornets (a YouTube documentary type thing about him) he has freaked me out to no end. Even writing about him now is freaking me out. So I'm going to stop because I feel a mini panic attack coming on...but yeah, ghosts and that sort of supernatural stuff freak me out too, and I can now barely walk from the light switch at one end of the kitchen to the lounge room at the other end with the lights off without freaking out. It's really bad. My mum said the same thing happened to her at around this age, so I'm really hoping it will pass, because this is starting to affect my sleeping when I can get to sleep because of real and imagined noises and the horrifying things my imagination can conjure up.

Well, that's my list of fears. I'm now sufficiently freaked out after writing that, and with perfect timing to- at 11:27 on a school night it's my bed time...ohgosh :P
Okay well I'm off to bed to try and get some sleep...
Bye bye now, y'all be sure to come back! (*insert your best southern accent here*)
(night ;P)
xoxo