8 May 07

Phobias and such

I picked up a copy of this month’s FACES last weekend and I got to reading about some of the more unusual phobias. Some of the examples were really funny! Did you know the following?

1.	Chirophobia	Fear of hands
2.	Neophobia	Fear of anything new
3.	Papyrophobia	Fear of paper
4.	Sesquipedalophobia	Fear of long words
5.	Urophobia	Fear of urine or urinating

Weren’t some of them hilarious? I mean, imagine having urophobia! How would you ever go to the toilet? Anyway, I started thinking about myself, and wondering whether I had any phobias myself.

I think a phobia that I have would be losing my teeth. I constantly dream at night of my teeth falling out. Ever since I was small, I’ve always had this thing about teeth. When I was about 8, I was in the kids’ swimming pool and I somehow knocked my teeth on the bottom of the pool and broke off about half of one of my front teeth. I remember crying and crying because I was so upset. Everytime my parents comforted me and told me not to cry, I just cried more. There was another time in school, I was eating a chewy sweet and the bell rang for the end of recess. I chewed my sweet really quickly to try and finish it, and a loose tooth came out and I ended up chewing my tooth.

Let’s see…I had this really big filling in one of my molars. It fell out a couple of times (see, that’s why you don’t go for free treatment at the University Hospital). I also extracted two of my permanent teeth there. I remember the dentist, who was a female, injected me and then tried to pull out the first tooth. She tugged and tugged and it wouldn’t come out. She had to call for help! In Australia, someone offered me a Tictac, and for some reason unknown to me, I bit it with my front teeth. Well, the fake part of the tooth (from my accident when I was 8 ) fell out. Urgh…it gives me shivers just thinking about it.

OK, enough about teeth. I’ll probably start dreaming about them tonight again!

My second phobia is speaking in public. I soo hate that. Last year, my colleague and I went to this seminar on public speaking. One of the tasks was to pick a partner (who you don’t know) and then choose a topic and speak on it for five minutes. The topics were really easy, the one I chose was the most interesting holiday I had ever been too. I was nervous even doing the one to one speaking, and my partner could sense it and asked me whether I was nervous!

Just last week, I was told I had to give a speech at a conference regarding one of the systems that we built. My mind immediately started imagining all kinds of things, hundreds of people listening to me talk, me forgetting all the words, that kind of thing. I freaked out for ages, even dreaming that I had got the dates mixed up and that I missed the talk. Of course, I was happy in that dream because that meant that I didn’t need to give the talk. In the end, it wasn’t so bad after all, it was just my imagination.

So, anyone got phobias to share?