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[muji]

Do you remember what you were afraid of when you were little, that you aren't afraid of anymore? What happened to make that change?

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[boston_bruiser]

I was scared shitless of bees (stung three times, all equally unpleasant). I just learned how to move really, really fast whenever I was around them.

[spooky-lemur.livejournal.com]

It was wasps or yellow jackets for me. I got stung something like three times within an hour once. I guess after that it just seemed like the worst had happened.

Earwigs used to really get me but nowadays it's only if the little bastards surprise me that I freak. Can't say why though, over exposure maybe?

[sdelmonte]

I was scared of science fiction. I have no idea what it took to change that, other than being exposed to it over and over through TV.

But to this day, I have never seen any Planet of the Apes films because the very notion scared the crap out of me.

[camwyn]

Germs. Thanks to a crudely animated sketch on Villa Allegre on PBS, involving a small boy who cut his hand on a glass bottle in a city park, a bunch of germs in biplanes and a bunch of what I think were white blood cells with vaguely Napoleonic hats, I was completely and utterly terrified of germs as a little kid. The drawings of rabies viruses (little dudes with evil white faces and fangs and black and blue outfits) in my The Value Of... series book on the life of Louis Pasteur did not help much either.

As far as what got me past it, probably spending vast amounts of time reading about medicine and what doctors could do and how to fight germs as a doctor. I know that I didn't go OCD- I think I may have just shifted my fear over time from 'fear of germs' to 'fear of that one sketch', and then let it fade.

[herdivineshadow]

Being pushed onto the top of a lift and getting my face torn off by the various mechanical workings there.

I suspect I kind of got used to the idea that it's highly unlikely that an incident from one of the Poltergeist films is going to happen in real life.

[ceitfianna]

I'm still kind of scared of the things I was as a kid-heights and snakes. I'm better about heights but every once in a while I'll go to someplace and my knees get all shakey.

Snakes make me nervous, but it's not as much of the irrational fear it was when I was little. I feel like there are other things but I don't recall them.

Oh and looking at other's fears, for a while I had a horrible allergy to bees and wasps and that family and was stung badly a few times but never had a fear of them. It was more a fear of my body's reaction-hives and wheezing than them. It's odd how fears work and don't.

[yakalskovich]

Mummies, as in mummified bodies. Odd thing to be afraid of, but then, as an achaeologist's daughter, used to museums from early on, it is an issue.

It grew into a fully fledged phobia when I was a teeanger, and when I was an older teenager, I cured myself from it by using fiction. I plotted out (and wrote in part) this original fic where a dead Peruvian who could come back alive at night was the hero. Anne Rice did the subject much better a few years later in 'Ramses the Damned'.

Anyway, it took me a while from full phobia to the moment where I went, with trepidation but curious, into the room with the mummies in the big Inca exhibition in Essen, hosted at Villa Hügel, formerly home of the infamous Krupp dynasty of steel barons -- but go I did, in the end, and never looked back, so to speak.

Much later, I gave that phobia to my main character in my long-running else!game, for great meta; that's why I have this icon.-

[aberrantangels]

Vacuum cleaners. Specifically, the kinds with hoses on the end. Grown-ups could say all they wanted about how the Elephant Vacuum would never suck me up, but I'd seen what its kind did. I'd seen the out-of-control vacuum that sucked up everything in sight, despite the Pink Panther's best efforts to control it, before sucking up the Panther and, mercifully, itself. I'd seen Super-Vac suck up Captain Kangaroo and all his friends. If Captain freakin' Kangaroo wasn't safe from vacuum cleaners, how could a mere kid like me be safe?

Then we got an upright vacuum cleaner, and even my six- or seven-year-old self could see how much trouble it would have sucking me up.