Fuck caves
Lately my partner has been on this whole YouTube tear about caves. Videos exploring caves, or videos talking about horrible caving disasters, the kind where someone goes into the cave and gets stuck in the cave and dies in the cave.
I absolutely cannot watch these videos. I hate caves. More specifically, I hate the concept of going into caves, especially the small ones. A big cave, with a view of the outdoors, is fine. Horrible little slimy tunnels – absolutely not.
I am not someone with a lot of phobias. I am broadly fine with spiders, heights, needles and all the other big hitters. I might not like them, but they do not produce within me a great feeling of horror and repulsion, the sort of animal-brain get the fuck away from me feeling that other people experience. I'm not even claustrophobic. Lifts are fine. Small rooms can be cosy. But caves... ugh.
I can actually trace the exact moment in my life when my fear of caves developed. When I was 12, I went on a school trip to a cave. Specifically, to go caving, the sort of kind where we were all supposed to don jumpsuits and crawl through narrow tunnels on our hands and knees.
I also can't see for shit, so 12-year-old me was wearing glasses. Some parent helper, imagining the risks of me smashing those glasses in the cave, tells me to take off the glasses. No glasses allowed in the cave. I can have them back post-cave.
I am not very happy about this, but I am also 12 and do not feel capable of standing up for myself, so I hand over my glasses and go into the cave. And I cannot see a fucking thing. I am wriggling around in a dark, slimy cave with an increasingly muddy head lamp and my only reference for where I should be going is to follow the blurry image of the kid in front of me like a guinea pig in hell.
Finally, the experience is over. I escape the cave. My glasses are returned. I go back to the place we are staying and have the longest shower of my life.
Fuck. Caves.
The thing that always gets me about these nightmare caving stories is that nobody is ever making these people go into the cave. You didn't have to do that! You were an adult! You could have stayed outside! Why would you go into the cave!!!!
Do not even get me started on underwater caves.