Fear

There are a lot of things in the world that hold us back from reaching our potential. Today in freshman French class (sarcastic cheer), as I sat paralyzed after being asked a question en francais, my mind wandered to the topic of fear. Fear is a common theme in all of our lives, and often keeps us from experiencing new things, or accomplishing tasks. As children, and also adults, a very important task we must accomplish daily is using the bathroom successfully and without incident. Unfortunately for me, fear often intervened. There were two main problems with the business of bathrooms. The first is fairly minor, and probably quite common among children. That mysterious chair that you poop into, also makes a very loud, sudden sound when flushed, and then violently sucks away the contents of the bowl. Naturally I assumed a few things.

1) I could be easily sucked down the toilet along with my business, and no one would ever know what happened to me.
2) The hole in the bottom of the toilet was obviously a portal to another dimension, from which evil spirits could emerge and tickle and/or pinch my bum. (Tickling was another irrational fear of mine, but I'll save that story for later)

Luckily the portal usually only opened when the toilet was flushed, so that particular fear could be avoided by simply not ever flushing the toilet. I'm sure my mom loved this.

However, there was one other tiny problem with using the bathroom. Some children develop imaginary companions during the early part of their development. Supposedly its perfectly natural and most of us grow out of it. However, my imagination concocted something a little more sinister. You see, I actively hallucinated (auditory AND visual) that medium sized gremlin type creatures wearing clown outfits lived in every bathroom. I, of course, named them

SPIKE CLOWNS (artist rendering pictured)

The name still sends a thrill of fear down my spine. They wanted to eat me and torture me and put me in the toilet, and would appear sometimes before I entered the bathroom, prohibiting its use completely, or during usage, which often resulted in me making a premature and messy exit. This is a pretty scary thing. However, The amazing thing about human beings is that we can overcome our fears, and many times we have no other choice. I'm happy to report that I can now successfully use the bathroom without incident, usually. Its a success story we can all identify with I'm sure. I hope it inspires you to be bold today, NO FEAR.