The duality of fear and attraction
An in dept timeline of my fascination and fear of death.
This essay will delf into nsfw topics, extensive talk of death (duh), talk of suicidal ideation, and suicide by hanging. Know your own limits.
To start this story we need to go back to 2009. I was 5 at this time. My great grandmother passed away. Which led to me going to my first ever funeral service. I vividly remember seeing the casket laying there, but aside from that, I cannot remember anything. This expirience triggered a kind of fascination around death within me. I fully understood what death meant, and I might have been a little too young to actually mentally process that. For a year afterwards I kept asking my mom when I would die. The only way she could calm me down, was by telling me, that when I die, I will most likely be ready for it.
During this time, I was at my grandparents' place often. There is this playground there right next to a graveyard. One day while we were playing there, I gor curious enough, and asked my grandparents if we could go to the graveyard. I do not remember much from in this graveyard, but something there freaked me out so much, I refused to step foot into another one until 16 years later.
When I was 6 one of my teachers died. I do not remember much of this, but it definetely helped contribute to my fear of dying, and furthered my fascination.
When I was 7, I started making little comics. They featured "the person without a name" (naming characters has always been my specialty as you can clearly tell). One of these comics was significantly more morbid than the others. My parents had told me to watch out for kidnappers by now. But hadn't told me why to be scared of them. Having no concept of pedophilia, I just filled in the blanks with what I did have a concept of. Death. I made a comic of person without a name getting kidnapped, and all the ways he could die. One I remember was him getting put into the washing machine. I then proceeded to give this morbid torture porn comic to my teacher to read to her grandchild. I am forever surprised no one raised alarm over that one.
Somewhere around this time I was also told that my mom's mom had passed away when my mom was 9. More stories about death in my already death filled life at this point.
When I was 8 my parents divorced. This took a huge toll on my mental health, and kind of forced me to grow up quite quickly. I became scared of adults. Part of me believed that all the adults in my life were actually tigers who would kill me in my sleep if I didn’t watch out. I never told anyone about this, but the general decling of my mental wellbeing lead to me visiting a therapist for the first time.
Around this time I created my first "imaginary friend", a ghost who was my age, and died by "drinking the chemicals under the cupboard as a baby". We would go on so many adventures together. He was kinda my lifeline during that time. I also became obsessed with Casper the friendly ghost because of this.
When I was 9 my alterhumanity really started to come up. I had always known I was a wolf, but I didn't know anything else until this year. At first my theory for the cause of my alterhumanity was that I was a shifter basically. That when I was asleep I would shift into a wolf. I also believed that I came from a land on the clouds where the cars were birds (I played a lot of zelda: Skyward sword around this time). One part of this land on the clouds was a giant graveyard. The graveyard where Keesje my ghost friend lived/was buried. This graveyard gave me a lot of comfort. Real graveyards were so terrifying I couldn't even look at them, but this one was comforting. My own little comfort place in my mind. .
Around this time was also when I watched an adventure time episode that would genuinely traumatize me. The episode was about ghost princess trying to figure out how she died. They dig up her body and find she was stabbed in the heart. You see a flashback where she was accidentally stabbed to death by her lover, who then commits suicide by drinking so muxh cheese he explodes. Very child friendly stuff. It genuinely makes me uncomfortable to even write about this now. This wasn't even the darkest cartoon I watched. I was also a huge fan of scooby doo mystery inc. Which for the people unaware of this specific reboot. It's waaaay fucking darker than the other ones, very much a pg13 show, and very much not for a 9 year old's eyes.
When I was 10-11 was when my fear of death was at it's peak. I got into creepypasta and horror movie content. Especially loved watching videos about it late at night. This led to me obviously becoming scared, which in turn led to me not being able to sleep. Because I was already basically fearful 24/7, graveyard became even scarier, and lucky for me, I was surrounded by them. How fun! In my city there is this windows logo formation of graveyards, and lucky me, my house was in the center of it. And to make it even better, I would have to ride my bike past another one every day going to school. I had a lot of panic attacks at night around this age. I wonder what could have caused that.
Then to make this time even more interesting. My headmate started to become active. He is a ghost wolf, he also hated my guts with a burning passion. The first time he decided to make himself known, was with making me hallucinate the face of a smiling woman a la genderbent Jeff the killer. This obviously scared the living breathing shit out of me. This then became semi common. Usually I would just hear people yell stuff, sometimes he pulled on my legs, but the visual ones were the worst. The one that takes the cake was, during a summer camp on a terrain that had an old viking home with human bone paste on the walls, he gave me the hallucination of an axe flying towards my face. I was not having a good time in 2015.
The same year though, my fascination with death also became significantly stronger. I worshipped the spirits of the deceased, without necesarily knowing what worship was. I made offerings, wrote letters, prayed to them. Anything you might do to a deity. I was also obsessed with the grim reaper. This was when my contact with the god of death from my past life started becoming strong. He visually looks exactly like the grim reaper. We would hang out a lot, especially in that summer vacation. We went to an island together, to that aformendioned viking bone paste camp, and I also stayed at his place a lot. (for a long time I kinda lived dually here and in my past life via daydreaming/astral projection.) I got a huuuge crush on him, and he was my main comfort for a while.
This same year (eventful year for me ik), I got an obsession with two tv shows. One was called "dude that's my ghost", about a highschool kid and his ghost friend. Kinda like me and Keesje. And the other one was ninjago. Now I became obsessed with ninjago during the fourth season. I especially got a crush on Lloyd. It was a huge hyperfixation for a while. Got a bunch of lego for my birthday and shit. Then right before summer break, the finale of season 4 aired. And it ended on a huge cliffhanger. A kind of spirit coming down and saying "tomorrow". Which was super omnious and had me hyped for the next season. During the summer vacation I got little sneak peaks of what the next season would entail, as it already aired in the US. This is how I learned that it was about ghosts, and that the big villain was called Morro. (This also lead me to coming to the conclusion that the "tomorrow" quote was a translation error, and was actually supposed to be Morro saying his own name.) I got incredibly hyped for the next season. Then when it aired it was everything I had hoped for. My crush on Lloyd immediately vanished, because there was a new hot lego figure in town. And my crush on Morro was intense. I carried a figurine of him everywhere I went. That was my emotional support object for a long time. Then (spoilers) at the end of the season he redeemed himself and basically killed himself right after, and that pissed me off so fucking much it immediately made me no longer hyperfixated on ninjago.
This was also the year I first started to become interested in sexual topics. Basically all the things (except for the grim reaper), that I mentioned being interested in this year, at some point had a sexual aspect to them for me. Some of my worship to the spirits included what could be considered sex magic, I had sexual daydreams about that weird ass ghost show, and me and Morro got up to some weird shit in my fantasies. This year was the shift from me just being fascinated, to me actually being attracted to death related topics.
12 and 13 were the start of the undertale phase. Had a crush on sans obviously. A small drawing of him uncerimoniously replaced Morro as my emotional support object. Eventually I got into the alternate universes. Which was very important for every other aspect of my life and development, but the only important thing for this timeline, is that Goth sans became my fav. It fluctuated between ink, dream and Goth for a long time, but eventually, Goth won, and became the most influental to my life. If my ink sans fictive ever happens to read this, sorry. Oh yeah and my cat died. That definetely did a lot mentally to me, I was very close to Gijsje
Then 14-15 came, and I found out about this lovely thing called reddit 50/50. That sure was amazing for a young developing mind. My mental health obviously went quite down the gutter at this time. But what really was the killing blow (pun intended), was a lovely video of a 12 year old girl hanging herself. I saw a lot of myself in this girl, I knew her entire life story, and related to a lot of her trauma. I will intentionally keep details about this all very vague, not just because it's not my story to tell, but I also do not want anyone else finding that video. She doesn't deserve to be viewed in such a vulnerable state, and the guilt I feel around having seen her like that might eat me up forever.
(I have my spotify on shuffle and it decided that "heads will roll" was an appropriate song to play right now)
This video caused me to spiral into a deep depression. I became passively suicidal and would frequently daydream about my classmates reading my suicide note. I never actually went trough with it, but only because I didn't want to do that to my parents and friends, and because I promised the god of death I wouldn't, because I didn't want my characters dying with me. I also had a very violent daydream plot going on, which was basically just my depression put into a story. It started with a suicide, which caused the main characters to basically get into limbo, where they were stalked by an emotionally abused child, the embodiment of female rage, and this figure who just had an aura of dispair around them. Basically all three of my emotions at that time.
This year was not all negative though. I actually look back on it with a lot of nogstalgia. For starters the depression gave me a killer music taste:
But also, it was the year that me and my previously hostile headmate, actually got into a relationship. Scare was definetely a huge lifeline for me as well. No matter how shit the world got, I had him to rely on. Most of my happy memories from this time include him. He still is my best friend. Of course being horny teenagers at the time. we expirimented sexually. A lot. Him being a ghost definetely made me significantly more attracted to him. Our enemies to lovers past also very much helped. This was also around the time I started to be able to at least look at graveyards. Still didn't go in them, that was terrifying, but I could look at them now. So huge win honestly. Then my grandma almost died which kinda undid some of that progress.
At the end of 2019 (so 15 at this time) I left the undertale fandom, but I still wanted to keep Goth and Palette as daydream characters. So I de-sansed them. Their names were now Benjamin and Darwin and they lived in like 13something. Ben was the son of a high ranking individual. Darwin the son of death. Also the black plague was happening. They had to figure out life together during a pandemic, while Darwin's job was to collect the souls. Also the fact they were gay in medieval europe definetely didn't help with this all. Then covid-19 hit and the pandemic storyline became a little too real for my comfort, so I dropped the entire thing.
In 2020 I did make another story, a hotel with mythical creatures a la hotel transilvania. I litterally just realized it's the same plot. Didn't once occur to me while I was actually working on this project. Anyways, this hotel featured a skull dragon, a werewolf, a hot bdsm vampire, and a nonbinary jōrogumo. There was also one other character but I lowkey forgot his name. They all had beef with two characters who were two certain spirits from native folklore I am not going to spell out here. If you know which ones I mean, you know which ones I mean. The vampire and the spider characters were my fav though. I was very attracted to the vampire (Lilro), and the spider (Niley), genuinely affected my identity so much that I am now spiderhearted. I at one point wanted to make a fursuit of the zombie dragon character, so I bought a skull head, and furred it. Eventually I kinda stopped engaging with this story, (except for Lilro who became a soulbond) so the suit got a new name, Mortis. I still take him to most conventions.
2021 was surprisingly death free. I made one death related character. A psychopomp dragon named Zoopsa, and I got a necromancer headmate who at one point allegedly revived and impregnated a spider, but that's it. I think I was a little too preoccupied with my system at this time.
Then came 2022 which was the complete opposite. Worst year of my life. My grandpa died earlt in the year, which heavily affected me, but that wasn't even the worst. During this horrible year, I had lost the abbility to picture my daydreams the way I was used to, they became foreign to me. This was incredibly fucking distressing, since as I probably established by now, daydreaming is highly important to me. It is the way I cope with basically everything. I genuinely don't think I would have survived 2018 if it wasn't for my daydreaming. I had to slowly build it back up. I did this by daydreaming about a psychopomp in love with a mortal (sounds familiar?) This time their names were Kaima the half psychopomp half mortal, and Arlan the mortal. They were very adorable together and brought me a lot of comfort. Except for one day. I had gone to sleep that night daydreaming about Kaima reaping a soul for the first time, and then I woke up the next day to a lovely email that my old teacher had passed away unexpectedly in his sleep that night. This fucked me up for a while. But it also was the beginning of me questioning if I might be in some way related to psycyopomps myself. Eventually Kaima became a soulbond so I stopped engaging with that story as well. But me and Kaima are good friends now.
That summer my grandma knocked on heaven's door. She had gotten sepsis in the scars from her previous dance with death. The day I heard this was in the evening. That day me and my dad had gone to the mansion of the last emperor of Germany, who fled to here after ww1 and was granted asylum. He is buried in a mosoleum in the garden of this mansion, and wanted to be properly buried when Germany has a king again. (Good luck with that my guy). I kept staring at the mosoleum, and I was filled with this intense sense of dreath. Like the "something is gonna go horribly wrong" dreath. Then I came home and got a phone call from my mom that my grandma would most likely not survive the night. It was 11pm, but I took a train to my grandparents' city and I stayed with her the entire night. Those two weeks we spend a lot of time in the intensive care. I hate the intensive care. I'm someone who picks up on people's emotions very quickly, and that entire floor was just filled with dispair and grief. My grandma's hospital neigbour was a woman her age, and at one point I looked into that room accidentally and saw a cloth over her face, next day the room was empty. I prayed to the god of death that my grandma would survive. I drew survival sigils everywhere, I could not lose her yet. I had already lost three grandparents, two before I was even born, and one earlier that year. I couldn't lose another. She survived, and was out of the icu within two weeks.
Then december 2022 came, and this fucking horrible year was finished nicely with me getting an amazing christmas gift from two lovely internet strangers. A list of all the reasons I should kill myself, and a fanfiction in which I did and my parents found my unreconizable body. It was the season of giving after all, and what better gift is there to give than ptsd.
The first half of 2023 was significantly better than the previous year. I had a daydream going on about a nonbinary necromancer spider ringtail cat named Argon. (All my spider characters are nonbinary. This is a rule). And their girlfriend Lilly. Aside from Argon raising the death, this was quite death free. Eventually I switched to the daydream plot I still have to this day. An enemies to lovers plot featuring a millionaire named Evan, and his girlfriend, a previously street kid named Drow. The less morbid subject was actually great because in the fall of 2023 I got suicidal again. I still didn't want to actually do it. But I definetely thought about it more seriously this time, also because I live in an apartment building now, and suicide has never been this easy. I am glad I am still here though, and my suicidal ideation has never returned.
In the beginning of 2024 someone in my friend group died. This heavily affected me at the time. I didn't know them well enough to grieve, at least not as much as others did. But I became quite hyperfixated on the death. Especially because of how little info we were given. We (as in the friend group) weren't even told he had passed away until two weeks after the funeral, and we were given zero info as to what happened. I had to figure it all out myself. I ended up writing this person a letter, burning it, and burying the ashes. That was the only way I had to say goodbye.
Then there was very little death related stuff (except for me going to greece, becoming midly obsessed with Hades, and dreaming about hugging the grim reaper), until the end of the year. In december that year I introduced a new character into my daydream. Craylus, the half mortal son of death (take a shot every time you have read me write those words). Cray's backstory was that he had fallen in love with a mortal (typical) in the 1920s, who then got shot and died in his arms. He buried her, was a depressed mf for a century, and then she came back to haunt him, because he never fulfilled his promise of them being together for eternity. So now they're a happily married psychopomp ghost couple. This story was writen at 5am to the song "again" by Noah Cirus and xxxtentacion btw.
2025 was a very death filled year for me. In a good way honestly. I discovered I was most definetely something death related in terms of kintype. So I started doing research, and thinking back on basically everything I have written up until this point. This kinda caused a spike in my phobia again, but eventually I decided to go to a graveyard, to face the phobia head on. I was fucking terrified, but it went well. Someone had thrown rotting tomatoes at some of the graves, so the next day I cleaned the place. I felt that this was quite appreciated. That night I heard a horse galloping at full speed at around 2am, which was mildly creepy, but it didn't feel hostile in any way.
Then during emdr we talked about that one time I saw a teenager hang herself. This reopened that wound for me, and it didn't really close again. I'm kinda going trough the whole process again. At least without the depression again. I ended up writing her a letter and burning it. Then dumbass me forgot to bury it until a month or so later. When I finally buried that, I felt a hug from behind. I kinda interpreted that as her saying that we're good.
Then I went to england. The entire vacarion had heavy gothic undertones which made me super happy. The first place we stayed at had an old ass Pub, oldest one in england. That place was so incredibly haunted. I heard a name being yelled by someone who wasn't there, heard random drumming, and you could just feel it. The first day it kinda creeped me out, the second day I spend 12 hours there, and only left because I needed to sleep. I fell in love with that pub. Genuinely romantically in love. I cannot wait to see them again.
Then we went to London, and ofc visited the tower. That was depressing. What was even more depressing was the gift shop. I don't know what possesed someone to design Anne Boleynn tote bags in the gift shop of the place she was killed. But what the fuck.
That september I got a nightmare about one specific graveyard in a forest I frequent. Also that girl was there. This nightmare undid almost all of my process I had made in fighting necrophobia :). So that was fun. I then proceeded to have like three more nightmares. Eventually I visited the graveyard I had cleaned before again to leave flowers, that helped a lot. But I am now very afraid of that one graveyard in the forest.
In november I officially confirmed my black shuck kintype. I in hindsight realized that my entire england vacation, I had been incredibly shifty. So I now kinda see that as my awakening.
And now we're in 2026. The ywar has just started, but already a few things have happened. I had a whole week where I felt real shit about the girl again. This was triggered by the song violent pornography, and now that song is officially one of my triggers, fun stuff. But I also got a plush to semi reprisent my black shuck kintype (and to protect me against my necrophobia). A black shuck Irish wolfhound mix named Morrigan. The base is a douglas sterling silver fox. I also visited the graveyard again two times. First time, some people were not acting respectfully, which caused me to get a very territorial black shuck shift, and I honestly kinda stalked them until they left. The second time me and a roommate cleaned up the place.
That brings us to now. I am going to do an analysis in another post. This one is already more than long enough. But that's the timeline of why I am the way I am lmao.
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