Eeeeeek I just saw a mouse! Wait… why on Earth do I fear mice so much?
More times than I care to admit, I’ve seen a mouse run by in my living room. I have tried many solutions for getting rid of mice, but since I live in a row house, it’s an inevitability.
Obviously, each time I see a mouse emerge from its hiding place, I let out a shriek. One thing I know for sure: it’s because the mouse has disrupted something I’m doing and I’m shocked. I work from home, so this can be especially disruptive. Each time I let out a shriek, it runs away and I go running for the hills. Luckily, my place is two stories so I can run upstairs. In my year of living here, I haven’t seen a mouse on the second floor yet.
Unless I’m reprogrammed, I feel like I will never let go of this fear. It’s been with me since I was a kid, when I lived in a farmhouse (so we saw them quite a bit). You think that I’d get used to it, but you never get used to something that you commit to being afraid of.
Sadly, I can’t pinpoint exactly why I fear mice. My fight or flight natural defenses are in full force whenever I’m surprised by one. Whenever I encounter someone that has no fear for the little critters, I’m perplexed. My fear is something that, to me, should feel universal to everyone. It feels real to me, therefore it should be real to anyone else.
Even though my 30 encounters in my life with mice have not produced a single consequential moment besides for me cowering in fear, I’m left in at the age of 28.5 years old to start questioning why I’m so full of fear.
Confronting this fear will be one of my many goals for 2017. I realize that to confront my fear of mice, I will really need to confront fear itself.
Each post that I will write about will be about confronting fear in some way. Why do we fear things that we don’t understand? This year I will take you on a journey where I confront my fears, including those about mice. Hopefully you’ll be able to get a lot of this.
This series won’t just be about mice, although it’s certainly the hook that catapulted me to run upstairs and write this post.
So I invite you to go on a journey with me.
Let’s conquer fear together. You may not fear mice like me, but fear itself is probably ruining your life in some way.
