Yesterday, my team at work made sudden plan of meeting up today, grabbing lunch and spending some time together.
We did meet up today at the nearby mall. There were the four of us and a last minute plan to include my last team lead. Everyone ended up coming at different times. We ate, talked and joked for a while.
After lunch, my ex-team lead left. Me and two other teammates returned to my flat (after some grocery shopping), where another of my teammate was already waiting – he wasn’t able to make it to lunch due to other commitments.
After some discussion on what to do for the next few hours, we ended up watching The Babadook. I am not a huge fan of horror movies. They keep me up at night when I am alone, and I do not like the feeling. Anyway, because there were the four of us, I thought it was worth a try – this was probably my first horror movie after The Conjuring.
I have never gotten the point of horror stories. I always used to wonder why people would pay to be scared. Why was the point of your heart suddenly wanting to jump out of your chest? In my opinion, if I had control, I would have all horror movies destroyed and stopped from being made.
However, I ended up liking The Babadook. More than a horror story, it is about the story of woman losing her husband while on the way to deliver their baby. It is the story of how she is coping after six years have passed since the incident – the story of how she wishes it was the baby that she had lost that day and not her husband. For the first time, while watching a horror movie, I felt that these movies are supposed to mirror the deepest fears that we have. The ghosts and the scary make-ups and the music are but symbols. My worst nightmare probably does not look like a ghost that walks with its legs backwards. But it is about how difficult we find it to cope with our losses and end up going down the rabbit hole of depression. To the point where we start imagining things that are not there.
Some realization, that! However, that doesn’t really mean I am going to try out more horror stories.
I am getting the creeps as I write this.
Until later! ❤
I encourage my cats’ fear of strangers, at least, I don’t discourage it. If a stranger comes to the door, particularly someone carrying tools and wires or other unknown entities, the cats hightail it down the stairs and under the bed. There they’ll stay until they’re certain it’s safe, and if they fall asleep (which they often do), even longer than that.
“Heads, I win; tails, you lose!” Fear used to say, every single time. Life for me was a long, dark stretch of fear-filled path for years. Some of these fears, like the fear of ghosts and monsters, were born and nurtured in my mind’s dark recesses, fathered by an overwrought imagination; some were born out of external events, caused by external agents – miscreants, child abusers, bullies in school – that tried to rob me of all that was good in me and left dark impressions on my mind. These fears started to rule my waking thoughts, my hours of sleep, my every move, my very life, in fact; my dreams turned into nightmares, I lost my sleep, my peace of mind, my confidence; I even lost my ability to help others for a time – no wonder that; how could I think of helping others if I couldn’t help myself? My life became a veritable hell, filled with depression and fear, and I started to feel as if I was constantly descending into a bottomless abyss. I started to be afraid of going to school and facing bullies, of going out and facing people, afraid of predators prowling in human form, but I was equally afraid of staying at home, alone: the walls seemed to come rushing at me, smacking their gaping jaws, wanting to swallow me whole. My fears wouldn’t let me be, not even for a moment; they would chase me to the edge of my sanity and persistently try to push me over.
Keeping in mind the theme of my my next book, How I tamed the dragon named fear, I am planning to include voice of the reader as a part of the book. For those of you who don’t know about my upcoming book yet, How I tamed the dragon named fear is a short self-help book on fear.
Scribbles@Arpita 