Mom hung a mass produced art print on my bedroom wall when I was about 8. It’s of a little girl holding her puppy.
Cute, right?
Thing is, this painting terrified me. And I was raised in the time where you just kind of swallowed any complaints and didn’t bother mom or dad with kid foolishness.
Here is a copy of the thing I actually had hanging on my wall. This same frame. Probably came from Service Merchandise or some such.
What in the everloving hell is lurking just over her shoulder?!?! To me it always looked like a skull wearing a hat on the side of his head, like a little old timey jaunty hat a clown would wear.
It’s a wonder I got any sleep. I was too afraid to tell mom I hated it. I never considered that I possessed the agency to take it off my wall and hide it at the bottom of the closet.
I think of this cursed painting still.
Did you ever have something in your childhood that unnecessarily scared the bejeezus out of you?
I was scared of real demons and spirit forces lurking in the dark until I was around 10 years old. Ghost stories were common and told by most people around me with my religious upbringing. Around 10 is when I realized I had never actually seen anything like the stories and first started saying I want to see them to prove my beliefs system real. Over the decades that evolved into god doesn’t have to be weird and can call me any time, my phone is on.
I was afraid of the world and realms around me, now I only ever fear the cruelty of humans and the monsters that hide within all of us, especially the battle within.
I’m a goddess and I’m not weird about it. I have a mortal body for an avatar so I can do stuff in the physical plane. Deus is supposed to have the Pope for a mouthpiece, but He doesn’t bother directly talking through the guy, and he really ought to have more than one with the size of His religion. People should stop worshipping Him to teach Him a lesson about being so distant.
And I’m a spaceman!
Pretending is fun!
When I was maybe 5 or 6 my mom had hung a couple of “Cydney” clown prints in frames on the wall in my room. Feel free to look them up online for a whimsical taste of 60s-era coulrophobia fuel 😬.
Every time we went out of town to visit relatives the glass on one of them would be fogged over when we came back. It was creepy as shit and I would refuse to step foot into my room until my dad wiped the fog off the glass.
Idk why we didn’t just ask them to remove the pictures. If I could go back in time to any point to meet myself, I’d go to 8y.o. me and get rid of that painting. (And then tell myself to remember to go all-in on AAPL and Bitcoin, etc etc)
