Polar bears.

Day five of January Blog A Day: Biggest Fear 

I promise that you don't have to tell me how ridiculous this fear is, or how much I need to just get over it, or how it's just plain ludicrous... You don't need to tell me that because every person who has ever heard me talk about these great white beasts has told me how crazy I am.

But polar bears scare the crap out of me.

Googling polar bears and looking at these pictures long enough to pick some made me break out in a cold sweat. I may never recover.

I will probably be murdered by a polar bear. It will hunt me down and rip my face off for fun.

Nice visual, huh? That's exactly what runs through my mind every time I see out of these nasty beasts, whether it be a picture, or at the zoo.

Oh, I just can't.

If I was this girl, I would be having a heart attack.

Polar bears may seem cute sometimes, especially when they are babies. But they only seem sweet because their mouths aren't big enough to do any real damage yet.

But they still try.

If that bear's mouth was big enough, that man would no longer have a leg.

When I was probably 3 years old, my family went to the zoo. The polar bear exhibit was down in a big cement pit, and to look into it from the side we were on, you had to look over a cement wall. It was probably 4 feet tall, and I was probably only 3 feet tall. My dad, the wonderful, loving man that he is, decided he would help me observe the polar bears.

Mind you, my dad is a big, strong, brick house of a man. And I was barely more than a baby. So picking me up was absolutely within the range or reasonable things to do, and he kept complete control over me during everything that was about to happen.

So. He lifted me up and over his head so I was sitting on his shoulders. While he was doing this, apparently the polar bear in the exhibit had wandered over to the very edge that we were at. Which meant that for me to see the beast, my dad had to lean forward a little bit. With me on his shoulders. You know the moment when your momentum changes and that dropping feeling in the pit of your stomach? It's similar to the very first drop from the top of a roller coaster. I'm not sure that I had ever felt that before, but I did then. 

And then I looked down at the polar bear. 

And it was looking up at me, 

smelling the air.

And I lost my mind.

I started wiggling (SO dumb) and crying and throwing a fit and hyperventilating.

I was so completely and utterly convinced that the polar bear was sniffing the air because it was going to hunt me down. It was going to grow gadget legs and leap up out of the exhibit and steal me right off my dad's shoulders.  And then it was going to torture me and eat me right there in front of all the other zoo attendees. My life would be over at the tender age of three, at the vicious paws of a murderous beast.

Let's just say I still get that feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I'm still sure the polar bear is going to kill me dead, every single time I see even a picture of one. 

So getting over the fear of finding pictures for the post is going to definitely require some wine. Drown the polar bear pictures in wine.