Before listing my childhood fears and talking about them, I need to tell you that my family saw no better way to educate and control us than through fear. Every action we took that was out of place or contrary to their parenting patterns was stopped by instilling a new fear in us, terrifying us with possible fatal consequences. For example, if we crawled under the table, they told us that there were dwarves under the table looking for us; if we played with matches, a witch would come out at night; if we walked barefoot, worms would come and eat our feet. I survived these and many other fears. Like a heroine, I faced them and even had to defend my sisters, like the many times I let my younger sister sleep in my bed because it was the only place she felt safe.

Not to mention that I grew up listening to unreal stories, legends of the dead, headless men, goblins, ghosts, and witches. Because of this, I have always been a victim of my imagination, which is why I write, and sometimes the line between reality and fiction does not exist for me. All I have to do is read or see something scary to imagine it, dream it, sense it. Waking up in the middle of the night, when everyone else in the house was asleep, was one of my greatest fears. At that hour, out of nowhere, all the stories my grandmother told me would come back to me, and everything I saw took on a disturbing, sinister form in the darkness: the trees outside the window looked like men, the movement of the curtain like someone hiding, the noise of cars like chains of souls in torment.

One fear I remember, and I never knew why I had it, was the fear of being abandoned by my father at the market. I imagine that many stories talk about how parents abandon their children or how children get lost in the forest, and the closest thing to a forest for me was the market. I remember accompanying my dad to the market every week to do the shopping. I would go happily, eager, smiling, until finally, my dad would take me to one of the cement benches with all the bags and leave me sitting there while he finished his shopping. Dad would always find me on the verge of tears because I felt like he was taking too long and had surely forgotten about me. The worst part was that while I waited with my heart in my mouth, I always made a plan to get back home: sell what was in the bags and use the money to take a taxi to where my family was and tell them that my father had abandoned me. Hahaha.

Another great fear appeared when I saw something too big: statues, buildings, caves, very large animals. Just seeing them made me dizzy. Being high up, seeing cliffs or things that exceeded the normal size of things, gave me tachycardia and made me want to vomit. So much so that there was a man who was very tall and had a warehouse, and every time I was sent to that warehouse, I would start crying because that man scared me. Over the years, I remember seeing this man, who must have been about 6 feet tall, and noticing how exaggerated my fear was.

I have overcome all these fears in one way or another, but there is one that I still have, and that is my fear of cats. I suffer from catophobia, and I'm not ashamed to say it. This is a fear I've always had: I don't remember ever sharing my life with cats. The worst thing is that I'm a magnet that attracts them. They can smell my fear, and I can be happy and calm anywhere, but if there's a cat around, it will come looking for me, try to jump on my lap, rub against my legs, or meow at me while looking at me defiantly. I scream...

Looking back, I see my childhood fears and they make me laugh. Many of those fears were unfounded, unreal, magnified by an incredible imagination. In contrast, my fears now, as an adult, are so real and they follow me like my own shadow.