BY BERİRE GÜNDÜZ CS/III)
berire.gunduz@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
They wake you up from your sweetest dreams, they make you nervous all of a sudden, and they may even cause you to hide under a desk. They are your fears, and most of the time they’re very illogical. However, you have to deal with them one way or another, because if you don’t, they’ll haunt your body and then they’ll eat your soul, and after that they’ll kill all your loved ones. So it’s time to define some of these fears and to find ways to cope with them.
• Phobia of speaking in front of a crowd
As a student or someone who has a job, you’ll have to speak in front of a crowd eventually. While you’re still a student, you have more chances to avoid facing up to this fear. You can ditch school on presentation days. But be aware of the attendance requirements and act accordingly. If you’ve run out of days when you can be absent, then just sit there and start to cry. Because there’s no running away from this presentation now! The good news is that there’s another solution. What anyone who’s afraid of speaking in front of a crowd should do is to play dead, as if facing a bear. Crowds usually lose their interest in people who doesn’t move at all. Their attention span is very short, and they get bored easily. If you don’t move for a while, they’ll lose interest in you too.
• Phobia of exams
Unlike presentations, you can’t escape from exams. You can at most delay them. So you should fight with them by playing on their weakness, which is water. Many exams are printed on paper, and paper is quite weak in repelling water. So when you’re faced with an exam, just pour a glass of water on your exam paper, and then joyfully observe how it dissolves, like your fear of exams, in seconds.
• Phobia of spiders
Spiders are humanlike creatures with eight legs, and they’ve always been hated and feared by humans because they’re envied by humans. We would love to be spiders, with eight legs that can also be used as hands, spinning our own house without having to pay money for it and eating food that basically throws itself into our hands, such as flies; these are definitely things to be envious of. So your fear of spiders is caused by unconscious discrimination growing out of the thoughts of our ancestors, who envied them so much. My advice for people who are afraid of spiders is, “Be more open minded! But if that doesn’t work, just kill them with fire, because that’s what they deserve.”
• Phobia of mothers
It’s quite natural to be afraid of mothers, especially your own mother. With their never-ending expectations, which force you to be the best human being on earth, and with their warm smiles, which make you believe that you actually can be the best human being on earth (when in fact you’re just a loser), they can cause anyone to become anxious in front of them. Let’s talk about how to overcome your fear of your mother. YOU CAN’T. Just go and wash the dishes, you lazy banana, and make sure you pass all of your courses at the end of the semester.
• Phobia of the future
You attended all your classes and took all the exams to fulfill your mother’s expectations and live as happily as a spider in the future. But what if things don’t go as well as you imagined? If you are concerned with “what if” questions like this, fear no more. Because bad things definitely and certainly will happen. There is no running away from this, and unlike crowds, life doesn’t lose its interest in you unless you are actually dead. So maybe you should find a way to not be a human anymore. You can try talking with spiders about being accepted as one of them, but I don’t think their answer will be positive after all of the things our ancestors did. What do you think about being a cockroach? I heard there was a guy who managed to become one!
Note 1: For real advice on how to deal with anxiety, you can check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzpky0zQSOk (8 Anxiety Tips That Actually Work).
Note 2: If you want to add some other phobias and ways of dealing with them, contact me via e-mail.