Well, I think it's a well-known fact by now that when I'm scared I hide behind people. Okay... Maybe I only do that on the Internet, but it is fun!

In reality, when I'm scared, I avoid the subject/person/event that scares me and, in the event I can't avoid it, I smile, but I don't talk and I get very...very...very... quiet. If forced to speak, I talk slowly (which is weird for me, since I talk fast) and I don't look into anybody's eyes, whether or not they are who/what I'm scared of.

And if I'm extremely scared I shake and stutter, but that's only happened, like, ten times?

Most of my characters, when they are scared act the same way as me, I think, because it's just the only way I can really portray fear...of course, sometimes I edit it a bit so one character has a more exaggerated reaction to fear than another, but usually they act the same as me...usually.

I've never been scared like, terrified, of anything physical whatsoever. When I'm scared it's of the future. I get scared about the outcomes of auditions and such like, and my solution is to pretend it's not happening. It's waiting that drives me insane. It's more like worry though, isn't it.

And then nightmares. I'm scared of nightmares. I couldn't sleep for a long time because I was afraid. I have no clue what set the nightmares off though.

And I'm scared of heights, which is irrational, and results in getting shaky inside and outside and staying away from the edge of stairwells and the tops of ladders.

The only time I think I've been truly scared by something truly terrifying (well, actually, the same thing happened to me twice...) was when I woke up in the middle of the night and one of my younger sisters was gasping for air. The minute I was awake enough to recognize the sound I was rushing for the light, waking my next oldest sister up, panicking because I had no clue what to do and I didn't think 911 could get there... and Mary calmly replies "She's fine." Of course, I was dubious but she assured me she was just clearing her lungs out. (We all had colds at the time that made us cough a lot...) But I don't think I slept well for a week after that. I wanted to set up a watch to make sure no one stopped breathing during the night, but everyone else told me I was overreacting. It was scary.

(The second time was that same week, my dad couldn't get that sister to wake up and was jokingly saying "She's dead! She's dead!" and I was just waking up and hadn't been sleeping well and I panicked all over again because I thought he was serious... scared the life out of me. My first coherent thought was "I shouldn't have slept, I should have made sure she was all right..." and then I realized he was tickling her. )

I personally fear mostly only what I do not know. (With a few exceptions). If I have never done something before, (like spoken in front of a group, chopped the head off a chicken, given a goat a shot, etc.) my stomach feels tight, and I imagine my blood pressure is higher than normal. I don't think people can really see my fear, though, unless I actually say it. However, I usually am more scared beforehand. Then when the actual event comes, I can 'ditch' the majority of the fear and concentrate on what I have to do.

I also have had nightmares. Mostly when I was little, but I have had a few since, and when I would wake up I would feel an irrational terror gripping me, and my heart would pound.

'Stage fright' is one kind of fear. The first time I had to talk in front of people, I was so scared that my eyes literaly could not see right. I could barely read my notes, and I was positive my voice was shaking. But I was told afterwards that I didn't look nervous at all.

Probably the scariest moment I had was once when playing at the public pool. I was in the deep end, under water, and was just coming up for air. I had got to the top and had let out my breath, but hadn't gotten a new one, when my friend jumped on top of me and dunked me back under again. That is one of the very few times that I've actually panicked. I couldn't see anything, and I couldn't breathe, and my heart felt like it was exploding, and all I could do was just fight to get to the top again. I couldn't even say anything when she let me up. I just crawled out of the pool and sat there.

Recently I was out walking, and I heard one of our goats making an awful crying, like he was in pain. He was just standing with his head down, and no other goats around. I walked up to him and found that he had a wire twisted around his throat, so tight that he could hardly breathe. I took off running to get some wire clippers, and somehow getting my heart rate up and my adrenaline going (at a time when I would normally not panic), affected me. By the time I got back, I was shaking and was hurting every time I breathed.

*will come back to this one, too *

Huh. Nervousness, I do the same as Vanya and pretend that there's nothing big coming up, be it a month in France or an oral presention. If I'm nervous, I ignore it until it's over. Kind of like: I know I'm leaving for France in ten minutes, but I'm closing my eyes and pretending I'm at home listening to music, instead of on a plane to Toronto. I also get butterflies inside during the presentation or concert or whatever.
I'm scared of spiders. This is the only time you'll see me jump and shriek. I do, however, jump and shiek when I see a spider. I won't go near them.
I sleep in the dark - as in, pitch black, with the only light coming through my window. I'm not scared of the dark, but whenever I have a nightmare, I wake up terrified. First reaction - good, it's not real. Second reaction - freeze. I will lay there, still, for a long time. I could be dying of thirst with my waterbottle two feet away and I won't move. I go really still when I'm scared of something physical, like the monsters waiting between my bed and my dresser to eat my arm off. Same if there's a spider actually on me.
The few times I've been most scared have been nightmares, about my sister dying, my dad dying, one when I was really little where there was some evil person in a very dark, very quiet building that looked like our church. They left a threatening note, too. That must have been at least ten years ago, and I still remember it. My reaction, once I actually managed to move, was to check on the people I worried about, turning on every light in sight on the way.
Also, if someone startles me, I don't jump, I whip around and get really angry at them. My brother can testify to that.

When I am going to play in a piano recital, I simply don't feel nervous---or at least I don't think I do. Then, when the moment actually arrives, I get that cold jolt in my stomach, and my hands and knees start shaking. The nervousness does not pass until I'm done, then I feel huge relief and feel tired all over.

I sometimes get scared, really scared, if something bad is happening to someone I know, like the night an ambulance pulled up to our neighbor's house. I had little idea what was going on out there, but was too scared to go out there with my parents and find out. I've noticed that theme with me: I feel so dark and cold inside, with my stomach clenched, and I desperately want to know what has happened, yet, just as desperately, I do not want to know. A pacing kind of fear.

Then, as for the horror kind of fear, I have had that, usually triggered by some unknown thing that I sense in the dark, like if I'm playing in the moonlight and the grass near me rustles. That is a different kind of fear than the pacing kind---I freeze, feel pale, then run for the light or company of another person.
I don't have nightmares often, and when I woke up from my last ones (which were a long time ago), I only felt relief that it was not real, and no continued horror. This might be due to the nature of the dreams, though (I posted one of them in the Dreams thread). They were not made of deep horror, such as familiar objects warping or weird shapes appearing in the dark. I am not prone to nightmares.

I'm not scared of the dark, but recently I got my own room; it's right at the back of the house far away from anyone else and I tend to feel a bit scared at night when I'm all alone. I love to surround myself in my covers, it almost makes me feel secure, I can't see anything I just hide myself, haha.

Aemi, I gave up on piano because of this, for the first few times I was fine in my piano exams, but then I got so nervous I would shake and be unable to play my pieces sometimes, it hardly seemed worth it in the end.

I remember when my sister was stalked, she said she was just terrified, being followed by someone, she was trying to make logical decisions about where to go so she'd be safe but when he started rushing towards her that all went away and she just ran as fast as she could. I think once fear overtakes you, that can just make you lose any sense of thought, you just want self preservation, if that makes sense. Although in her case, she did the right thing.

I was fearful of something recently, and in the end I was thinking and worrying about it so much I just had to give it over to God, and then all the worry and the fear went away.

This doesn't have as many replies as grief but the posts are equally helpful *bookmarks*

eru

You can keep playing piano in private, can't you?

Your sister had a real reason to be scared, didn't she? Wow, that would be so frightening.

I'm generally a very... unafraid person. Often to my detriment. So my experiences with real fear have been few, but exceptionally hard-hitting.

Perhaps my greatest fear has been that of a dream. Not an ordinary dream. I rarely have 'nightmares' because I'm not scared by dreams. This one occured two or three times. Always the same. And its weird for the subject matter was not frightening. Hard to explain, but the general gist was, before my eyes were many bricks, which belonged horizontal... all fitting in together. The dream revolved around this fact... and the great terror that siezed me whenever they were put vertical. More to it, of course. And it was real terror... the kind that nearly scares you witless, that reappears before you eyes when you wake up staring over the bed covers, trying to tell yourself that it was just a dream... Unable to.

Second... Shortly after I broke my wrist when bucked off a horse, I lay in bed one night and saw it happening again in my mind. Different shades of green all blurred and a blue, blue sky... and then, right before me, a bay rump bucking away while I hung in mid-air... Mmmm. Though I hadn't been scared at the time (as I said, detrimental... how I got hurt in the first place) I was scared, once and once only, remembering.

Fear in the above cases was basically the same. All I felt was absolute stillness... the absorbtion of my conscious mind captive by imagination in fear. Hard to shake off. A... frozen feeling, I suppose, that's hard to shatter... no, not shatter. Its more like one's mummified and one's got to start by wriggling... trying to get loose in the wrappings. A slow struggle that really doesn't take very long, but is gradual.

In all cases, I fight fear by action. Reclaiming my mind. Doing something about the fear if its rational. Walking. Writing. Not letting my mind dwell on it.

*subscribes to topic*

Ohhh... and one other time. A more... real fear I guess. It happened down the street. I was walking and behind me, about ten paces back, a man in a car yelled something. I'd just passed and I knew there was no one else around. Its hard to say what exactly happened... At once my thoughts, my head was clean... and I was keenly aware of everything around me. I kept walking at the same, calm, pace, but I felt frozen. Stiff. LIke I was terribly alive inside but had zapped every outside feature into a rigid calm. I wanted to look behind and run but not for the life of me would have acknowledged that I'd heard. My heart thumped, swift and painful. My ears strained for the sound of footsteps. By the time I'd reached the next street and nothing had happened I felt loose and quivery. (No, 'quivery' is not a word... )

This is an emotion I have had a lot of experience with, so this will probably be a long post... I apologize beforehand, because I know that it will be rambling.

Well, as for myself... when I'm nervous, I just kind of stand with my shoulders slightly hunched, and probably messing around with my hands--intertwining my fingers over and over again, grasping my wrists, cracking my knuckles. My mom always knows when I'm nervous.

Pure terror is something I deal with considerably more often. I have General Anxiety Disorder, so I worry a lot. And oftentimes, that worry and anxiety quickly dissolves into greater fear.

Let me see if I can come up with an example... once my biological mom went into the hospital. She was practically paralyzed, and she nearly died. I was thirteen at the time, if I remember correctly. I can't remember how it made me feel--I do remember thinking every few minutes, "She could be dead at this very minute... she could have died just now..." for several weeks.
She got out of the hospital, and she's pretty much okay now, though.

Some things that happened more recently though are easier for me to remember my emotions towards. A few friends last year were... suicidal, I guess, for lack of a better word. It's a touchy subject, I know, but I promise it won't go any further than just the word.

Well, one time, a friend told me that they were giving up. I couldn't say anything to them, because they got offline. I stared at the screen for a long moment, then kind of got up and stumbled into the living room and sat down in a rocking chair. It was dark, and I just sort of stared some more. I was just in shock for about ten minutes.

But then I started shaking, and my breathing started to become irregular and way too fast. Then I just started crying. I tried to hide it, because my family was still around. My mom came in and noticed though. She kept asking me questions a mile a minute, did my brother hurt me, did something happen, what was going on. I couldn't seem to get the words out, and in the end, I just started sobbing into her shoulder.

I kind of walked around in a daze for a week after. After the initial shock and despair, it was just a numbness. There was a lingering worry--where was she, what was she doing now, was she okay? But mostly, I didn't feel anything.

(For those of you who are wondering, my friend's okay now. I won't go into the whole story, as it's not relevant.)

Then there was another time one of my friends went into the hospital. I didn't find out until after they got out. Still, though, it hit me hard. Sure, they were out and safe, but I was still panicked.
It was a different sort than the one I mentioned above, because I knew that my friend was, in all likelihood, going to be okay. It was just the shock of all the possibilities that could have happened running through my head.

I started trembling, and my mouth went dry. There was this knot in my chest; around my lungs and heart, I think.
My mom made me get off the computer shortly after, and I just ran upstairs. I was kind of dizzy; I kept slamming into things, like the banisters on the stairs or the door to my room.
My mom came up a minute later and immediately knew something was wrong. I turned sullen, and refused to tell her for a while. I didn't want to confide in her, because I was afraid of what she would say. But I had to, and she was okay about it.

The long term emotions for that particular scare were mostly snappishness. When I came downstairs again, my brother made some sort of wisecrack, and I just flew off the handle. I started screaming at him, and I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him a bit before pushing him away (this is my fourteen-year-old brother who's already several inches taller than me and a great deal stronger). He started to fight back, but my dad broke it up. Later, when we had to eat dinner together, I just stalked into the kitchen with my shoulders hunched and the hood of my sweatshirt up. I think I was basically challenging my family to make a comment. I didn't want to hear anything from them, and they respected that, saying nothing.

I refused to be amiable to anyone for a couple days afterwards. I snapped at my brother and my mom, and I didn't feel like talking to the phone to any of my friends. I was pretty quiet too. I only spoke to snap or fire off a short 'yes' or 'no'.
And yeah, I cried. I couldn't help it. I was so afraid, because if things had been just a little different, my friend might not have made it.
The next week was mostly an aftershock from the initial news. Once I finally managed to wrap my brain around the fact that my friend was fine, he was going to be all right, I slowly went back to normal emotions.

So to sum it up, when I'm afraid, my heart pounds in my ears, I shake, and I cry.

That's about it... I'll stop rambling now. I hope this was some sort of help; I wouldn't have wanted to take up space here.