Ree’s musings

I am insanely proud of me. There was a link on a blog I read. Without clicking it, I was able to realise that it was probably a shock page. These things claim to be a calm pretty picture or a game where you have to look very closely, but then they switch to a bad monster film. Usually it has very loud sound.

I don't like to trumpet my deficiencies, but I do have an anxiety disorder. Those shockers really play with my head. They reduce me to a babbling, quivering mass of fear. (Hell, ask my friend Arak. I completely lit into him after he emailed me a link to such a thing.) Even just thinking about it, months after I was last confronted with one... my chest constricts, a lump forms in my throat so it's painful to swallow. My skin twitches all over and my stomach suddenly has ice in it.

Bah. But I could tell without clicking, thus sparing myself an evening of incoherent muttering about the evils of the internet and what if somebody had a heart condition because couldn't that nasty little game kill such a person?

See, this is why I used to keep plugins and in-browser sound turned off. Occasionally an animated gif still gets me (hey squirrels, remember that wicked kitten Livejournal icon I found? *twitch*), but mostly I do okay.

Crazily, once I know that something is panic-inducing, I will happily subject myself to it time and again in an attempt to increase my resistance to it. I've done that just recently with the cover of a movie that absolutely freaks me out. Has since I was small, when the movie first came out. (Bear, you know the one. Those eyes, good cheese man!) But when I am calmly reading something placid and silent, and then the screen fills with Bigfoot from the Black Lagoon with a raygun and he is howling at a volume best described as "eleven," my guard is completely down and it's a direct hit to my loathsome anxiety.

Anyway, today I didn't have to freak out at all. Yay Ree!