Things I Used To Believe When I Was A Kid (Part 1)

I was quite an eccentric child back in the day. I honestly don’t know where I got some of the ideas I did. It must have been a combination of an overactive imagination and watching strange things on TV. Here are three of the most peculiar things I used to believe:

1. The moon followed me and I was special enough for it to follow.

At night, I was convinced that the moon followed me wherever I went. This belief often struck me when I was in the car with my brother. We used to duck down in our seats, pretending that the moon couldn’t see us, and then pop up suddenly to shout, “Look, it found us again!”

We were young, okay? For some reason, I genuinely thought the moon chose to follow me and me alone. I never considered that it might also follow anyone else.

2. I was important enough to change the alphabet and its structure (and I believed that toys are the ultimate declaration of love).

I actually wrote a love letter when I was in preschool. If you look at the first letter of my name, the “Y” at the bottom of the page, you’ll notice something strange. The heart I drew isn’t the key detail here -it’s the orientation of the “Y.”

I flipped my “Y” horizontally on purpose. Why? Because it almost looked like a “K,” the first letter of the name of the boy I liked. I knew exactly what I was doing when I wrote it like that. I thought it was clever, and to be honest, I really liked him.

Sadly, I think this creative decision resulted in some poor marks at preschool. As for the Power Rangers toy he gave me? Long gone.

3. Whenever my mom switched off the lights then ghosts, demons, Chuckie and ninjas would pop out of the ceiling and ground.

I think most kids who are afraid of the dark have some version of this belief. I, however, had a very specific fear: Chuckie. This terror came from watching only ten minutes of Child’s Play -right up to the part where he throws the girl’s mom out of the window.

For a long time, I stayed quiet about what scared me. I would lie in the dark, my imagination running wild as I pictured all kinds of horrors around me. The second I thought my mom was in her bedroom, I would make the fastest dash known to humankind to reach the light switch. My eyes were usually closed during these sprints, and as you can imagine, this led to a few painful collisions.

One day, I finally plucked up the courage to tell my mom why I was so afraid of the dark. She listened, understood, and assured me that I would eventually get over it. I even drew a picture of one of the creatures for her.

Her solution was brilliant in its simplicity. She handed me a cooking stick and said, “If you see them, beat them away.”

And you know what? It worked. 

For reference, the creature I was afraid of came from Dexter’s Laboratory. It wasn’t the creepy episode where the fish died. It was from the G.I.R.L Squad episode, where Dee Dee and her friends try to fight crime in their neighborhood and end up making a mess. There was this shadowy figure they followed for the entire episode, and that was the creature that haunted me.