9 Things That Turned Out to Be Harmless

I wasn't necessarily a very scared person back then, but I did have my fears. Few of them were really grounded, but at the time, of course, I considered them real world problems. And for a number of them, I genuinely thought I would have to deal with them my whole life. Those things that you could really worry about and that I now never worry about at all. No idea what I'm talking about? I find that hard to believe, or I might really be the only one who used to think the following 9 things were actually quite a big deal…

1. Quicksand is not such a big deal as I thought
Maybe this fear started when I first saw The Neverending Story (where the horse gets stuck and I can almost cry at the thought), but I really thought I would encounter quicksand much more often in my life. I also found it very important to know what I should do in such a case, because in my nine-year-old mind, the chance that I would end up in this situation was inevitable, but the chance that I wouldn't survive it was also quite large. How many times did I actually come into contact with quicksand? Zero. How many nights was I still busy preparing for it? A lot.

2. The Bermuda Triangle is actually quite easy to avoid and not dangerous at all
I found this so fascinating back then. I really saw the Bermuda Triangle as a kind of big black hole that sucked everything around it in and let nothing alive out. I didn't believe that planes flew over it. Or well, believed... I didn't even consider that it was like that. That was out of the question. The Bermuda Triangle was super dangerous, extraterrestrial, and we all had to stay as far away from it as possible.

3. That teachers said that certain math problems are very important because you won't always have a calculator at hand
*looks at my phone*

4. The light in the car absolutely must not be on
You know, that light that comes on when you open the door. And I don't mean that my parents didn't want it on (which was also the case), but that it was just a general rule in the universe of driving: that light must not be on. And every time I was in the car in the dark and I had to read something, I had to do it very quickly because that light had to go out again. By the way, I left it on once and then the battery of our then Nissan Sunny was immediately dead (what a gem). So this fear might be a bit grounded.

5. Slipping on a banana peel is something to watch out for
This came up so often in (animated) films and people fell flat on their faces because of it. That shouldn't happen to me, of course, so I made sure to avoid those banana peels on the street. It has come in handy those four times in my thirty years that I've seen them lying around.

6. Super glue is indestructible and you really shouldn't touch it
Yes, if you glued your fingers together with super glue, it would never be right again. No idea how I envisioned that further, but anyway, you would then continue your life with glued fingers. Or you had to cut it loose and that wasn't a very relaxing option either. Super glue was, next to quicksand, the most dangerous thing you could come close to.

7. Your signature always had to be exactly the same, otherwise it was illegal
I practiced for hours on my signature because it had to be the same every time. Because it was really a huge big deal if you had to sign something and you got caught because they were different. Spoiler: that's not a big deal.

8. Speaking of easy to avoid: you don't get to Chernobyl quickly either
The whole idea that there was so much radioactivity there and that where the explosion was is so dangerous that the only photo they have of it was taken with a mirror... I found that really scary. So you can never look at it without dying. Probably the whole ‘you can't look at it directly’ was my biggest problem because I wanted to do that. No idea why I worried about Chernobyl back then, but I thought that radioactivity could become very troublesome for my generation.

9. If you ever catch fire: stop, drop and roll
This is so ingrained in me that I couldn't imagine anyone not having caught fire at least once. Like: you're almost an adult and it hasn't happened to you yet? Then you're really lucky because almost everyone catches fire at least once in their life. And if that happens, you need to know what to do. Extra fear that I didn't have enough space to roll properly.