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  • "You know, sometimes it feels good to be part of something bigger than just yourself..."

  • This just unearthed a locked-away memory for me: I was watching a Mr. Rogers episode and he sang a song called something like, "you can never go down the drain" about how you can't be sucked into the sewers while the bathtub was draining and it was a concept that had never occurred to me before and the imagery terrified me despite knowing it wouldn't happen to me, so I was really anxious about being in a tub that was draining for quite some time after that and would get out as soon as my parents started draining it.

    • This reminded me of a similar thing from my childhood. I grew up in a very traditional Indigenous family. My parents were born in the wilderness so I grew up doing a lot of very traditional things like hunting, trapping and fishing. One of my earliest farthest memories is being out on the ice gill net fishing with my parents. I must have been about seven eight years old. You have to set out an area on a river and then chip out a series of holes to literally 'sew' a net under the ice attached to a long pole guiding the pole past the holes you made. I can remember looking at those holes in the ice and wondering ... if I fall in, I won't be able to get back through the hole ... I would end up stuck under the ice until I died. The holes were small ... but I was small too and I knew I could easily fit through the hole ... it was a weird fascination between I don't want to drown in an ice hole ... and I wonder what it's like under the ice hole. It completely freaked me out and became an embedded permanent memory for me forever after.

      It's weird thinking about dangerous things when you're a kid ... you know the danger, you know it might even be deadly but you're curious to find out what it would mean or what it would feel like ... it's amazing any of us survive through childhood.

      • The idea of falling in an ice hole also freaked me out because of the movie Never Cry Wolf, which seems to have dropped down the memory hole. I liked it a lot when I was a kid.

    • I assume this doesn't help:

      Trauma aside, very astute of Rogers and the writing team to address that very idea.

      • I'm sure it was a very real fear for other kids, but for me it was like a horror film. That said, I've never seen either version of It.

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