Unusual Phobias

Health Central, an internet health site, offers an interesting review of unusual phobias, and because I have always known that I have several phobias, I couldn't resist clicking to see if my two biggest are on that list -- fear of heights and the fear of leaving home. They weren't, so that must mean that they're usual instead, and that's the bad news.

The list started with fear of being touched -- aphenphosmphobia. Actually I have a touch of this one, though it doesn't stem from any traumatic childhood experience, unless, of course, you include Jim Crow. It comes more from the cold-blooded idea that since others might not want to be touched by me, I feel that it's only proper to be averse to being touched by them.

I don't at all suffer from cacophobia -- fear of ugliness. In fact, you might say I go maybe excessively in the other direction, so that, for instance, I have often thought that I have never seen a 100% ugly woman, because they always have at least one redeeming feature somewhere on them. But I've never gotten the chance to say that, nor, so far as I know, have I ever said to anybody that I have seen people who were so ugly that they were beautiful.

I never got the chance to develop a fear of stepmothers -- novercaphobia -- because I never had a stepmother. I don't fear stepfathers either, though I did have one of those. But because of that I am a little suspicious of them.

Also I have the complete opposite of vestiophobia -- fear of clothes . Instead I believe wholeheartedly in always wearing clothes, even though I am completely indifferent to styles, appearance, and so forth. One reason is that I don't like being cold, and this makes me wonder, from the pictures I see in such profusion, why half the women in the world, or at least this country, aren't going around perpetually shivering. I also don't like being naked, and I don't get anything out of seeing other people naked. I know where that came from. The senior high school that I attended, in D.C., while supposedly a good school, at least on the Rainbow ("black") scale of things, had a swimming pool, and swimming was a required part of physical ed. But unfortunately, for reasons that I don't fully know to this day, we had to take those classes buck naked -- separated by gender naturally -- and I didn't at all care for being naked among a bunch of other naked anybodies of any description.

Selenophobia is just ridiculous. I love the Moon, and the Sun, too. In fact I guess I worship them. Where would we be without either one, and in fact those two celestial bodies hanging in our sky are directly responsibile for the great majority of the beauty that we see in the world.

Obviously I don't have a fear of long words either -- hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. I mention this one only out of the thrill of typing that name -- though actually I cut and pasted it instead. Didn't trust my memory to hold that word long enough, you understand, or even to ingest it in the first place.

Pteronophobia, the fear of feathers, is understandable only if you have a job being a chicken-plucker.

I don't have a fear of clowns - - coulrophobia -- either, though I never thought they were funny even while I was deepest in the throes of childhood. The only people I ever saw who looked good with their faces completely coated with snow white stuff were the makos -- the geisha-type women -- that I saw in person once in the inn in Miyajima, Japan, where I stayed during one of the most idyllic periods of my life, in 1959.

I also am not afflicted at all by the 10th and last unusual fear covered by the Health Central slideshow, panophobia -- the fear of everything. From everything that I've seen, heard, or read, my sense is that this is a disorder that is experienced much more by those in this country whose ancestors came primarily from Europe than it is by those whose forebears hearkened principally from Africa.